Research projects in Information Technology

As a pregnancy approaches term (the point at which the foetus is considered fully developed), decisions are made about the timing of birth and the way babies are born. These decisions are incredibly challenging for clinicians and pregnant women. Digital health records, advances in big data, machine learning and artificial intelligence methodologies, and novel data visualisation capabilities have opened up opportunities for a dynamic, ‘Learning Health System’ – where data can be harnessed to inform real-time and personalised decision-making.

Metals are made of small crystals - i.e., atoms are arranged in a particular geometric arrangement, which are typically in the range of a few 10s of microns (0.01 mm). The arrangement of these crystals greatly affects the performance of the metal and hence the performance of components where metals are used - such as in aeroplanes, gas turbine engines, cars, etc. The manner in which such materials deform, crack and fail under a variety of conditions is an important area in terms of cost and safety.

This project aims to identify novel methods for inferring actors, activities, and other elements from short message communications. Covert communications are a specialist domain for analysis in the Law Enforcement (LE) context. In this project we aim to improve law enforcement’s understanding of online criminal communications, exploring texts for automated understanding of intent, sentiment, criminal capability, and involvement.

This project will investigate and develop the ways in which AI algorithms and practices can be made transparent and explainable for use in law enforcement and judicial applications

The use of AI in law enforcement and judicial domains requires consideration of a number of ethical issues.  This project will investigate and develop frameworks that embed ethical principles in the research, development, deployment ,and use of AI systems in law enforcement (LE). A major focus is expected to concern the acquisition, use, sharing and governance of data for AI in this context.

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. Learning analytics promises to enhance feedback practice by providing real-time data and insights into learning behaviour and outcomes, so as to inform educational interventions. However, the feedback loop remains open without an understanding of how students make use of the received feedback or the #sustainability of such feedback practice.

The United Nations Development Programme has identified access to information as an essential element to support poverty eradication. People living in poverty are often unable to access information that is vital to their lives, such as information on their entitlements, public services, health, education or work opportunities. Timely access to information is essential to perform many economic, social and leisure activities. In today’s digital age, information is more and more often provided in digital form.

Complex questions are those that involve discrete, aggregate operators that operate on numbers (min, max, arithmetic) and sets (intersection, union, difference). Recent advances in complex question answering take a neural-symbolic approach and combine meta-learning and reinforcement learning techniques [1,2,3]. On the other hand, the generation of complex questions, the dual problem, is less explored. Recent works on knowledge graph question generation [4,5] have mainly focussed on multi-hop questions.

This scholarship will provide a stipend allowance of $29,000 AUD per annum for up to 3.5 years, plus $4,000 travel allowance. If you are currently in Australia you are strongly encouraged to apply. If successful, you will join Dr. Roberto-Martinez Maldonado, Prof. Dragan Gasevic, and a strong team of academics, researchers and other students at the Centre of Learning Analytics at Monash University, Melbourne.

The Australian Research Council (ARC) Training Centre in Optimisation Technologies, Integrated Methodologies, and Applications (OPTIMA) is seeking applications for ten ARC fully-funded PhD projects with generous top-up scholarships.

We're looking for talented students with a background in mathematics, computer science, statistics, economics, engineering or other related fields. These positions are offered across OPTIMA's nodes located at Monash University or The University of Melbourne. Projects will be available from June 2021 onwards.