Research projects in Information Technology

Student satisfaction with feedback is consistently low in higher education, and there is a lack of understanding regarding how students interpret and interact with feedback. Beyond the formal education context, feedback continues to play an important role in shaping individuals' performance in workplace and lifelong learning.

Species’ distributions are shifting in response to global climate change and other human pressures. Accurate methods to monitor and predict distribution shifts are urgently needed to manage threatened species and ecosystems, and to control invasive species and diseases. This requires a step-change in the data and methods used to monitor and predict organism behaviours and ultimately shifts in species' distributions.

"A picture is worth a thousands words"... or so the saying goes. How much information can we extract from an image of an insect on a flower? What species is the insect? What species is the flower? Where was the photograph taken? And at what time of the year? What time of the day? What was the weather like on the day the photograph was taken? This project aims to extract useful ecological and/or horticultural data from digital images by analysing their content.

Insects are vital components of natural and agricultural ecosystems that interact with plants in complex ways. Computer simulations can help us understand these interactions to improve crop production, and to assist us to sustain our natural ecosystems as we change the Earth's climate. This technology is vital to inform our strategies to protect global food supplies and manage our national parks and forests.

This project builds on research in which geo-tagged social network site images are used to determine insect and flowering plant distributions on a continent-wide scale. This work was awarded an "AI for Earth" grant by Microsoft, one of only 6 projects in Australia to receive this recognition.

This is an umbrella project that develops methods to monitor animals and more broadly biodiversity in natural environments. It focuses predominantly on acoustic methods but data fusion with visual and abiotic sensors is also considered. This is part of of our broader initiative in the Environmental Informatics Hub to develop the technologies that are required to effectively support conservation and biodiversity research.