Honours and Minor Thesis projects

For Australians with impaired vision, accessible books are a lifeline to education and vital everyday information, and also to the independence and personal autonomy that sighted people take for granted. Yet much literature remains in an inaccessible format. 

Today's society and its organisations are becoming ever-increasingly dependent upon Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems mostly based in cloud data centres. These cloud data centres, serving as infrastructure for hosting ICT services, are consuming a large amount of electricity leading to (a) high operational costs and (b) high carbon footprint on the environment. In response to these concerns, renewable energy systems are shown to be extremely useful both in reducing dependence on finite fossil fuels and decreasing environmental impacts.

BARD: Bayesian Argumentation via Delphi [1] is a software system designed to help groups of intelligence analysts make better decisions. The software was funded by IARPA as part of the larger Crowdsourcing Evidence, Argumentation, Thinking and Evaluation (CREATE) program. The tool, developed at Monash University, uses causal Bayesian networks as underlying structured representations for argument analysis. It uses automated Delphi methods to help groups of analysts develop, improve and present their analyses.

Point of sales (POS) is the data that is recorded at the retailer level when consumers purchase the products.  POS data is becoming increasingly popular for companies to predict their sales. In a supply chain, the POS data are often used by retailers to predict their sales, however, manufacturers and suppliers have not benefited enough from POS data. Retailers place their orders to suppliers as they predict their sales.

Demand forecasting is the basis for a lot of managerial decisions in companies. During the last four decades, researchers and practitioners have developed numerous quantitative and qualitative demand forecasting models including statistical, machine learning, judgmental, and simulation methods.

Combating cybercrime and maintaining national security is a global challenge. In light of this the Cybersecurity Capacity Maturity Model for Nations (CMM) has been deployed in over 80 countries; the objective of the CMM is to understand and evaluate cybersecurity capacity within these national contexts in order to support the “well-being, human rights and prosperity”. The outcome of each deployment is a comprehensive report.

Using digital technologies (such as 3D printing, soundscapes, beacon navigation), this project will explore the creation accessible cultural experiences for people who are blind or have low vision (BLV). Accessible materials and space design will be developed and evaluated to provide an evidenced-based framework for producing inclusive experiences with arts and culture, such as Art Galleries. Current partners include the Bendigo Art Gallery and Science Gallery Melbourne.

Within the faculty's Centre for Organisational and Community Informatics, the Archives and the Rights of the Child Research Program is investigating ways to re-imagine recordkeeping systems in support of responsive and accountable child-centred and family focused out-of-home care. Progressive child protection practice recognises the need, where possible, to support and strengthen parental engagement in the system in order to ensure the best interests of the child. 'No single strategy is of itself effective in protecting children.

The suitability of a search method for solving an optimisation problem instance depends on the structure of the fitness landscape of that instance. A fitness landscape in the context of combinatorial optimisation problems refers to the search space of possible solutions, the fitness function, and the neighbourhood operator.

Networks are a useful way to model complex data and systems, from biology, to engineering, to social, economic and political structures.  Visualising such network-structured data can be a difficult challenge: when connectivity is high diagrammatic representations of the networks become very dense and tangled.  Immersive environments such as virtual and augmented reality offer a way to use the space around analysts to spread out the network to better show the connectivity.  This project will explore such immersive environments and natural interaction techniques to allow analysts to better…