Research projects in Information Technology

Empirical studies in Information Visualisation research have become more commonplace in the past two to three decades. While formerly the research focus was primarily on utilising the power of novel technologies for presenting data and information in innovative ways, perspectives have changed over time so that evaluating the worth of visualisations (for user, for task, for context) is now considered a crucial stage of the research process.

This research project is part of a DECRA fellowship funded by the Australian Research Council for a project titled, Everyday Insurtech: Impacts of Emerging Technology for Insurance. The fellowship will study the development, adoption, and implications of digital technology and insurance—such as tools for capturing individualised data about behavioural risk factors and automating enforcement of policy conditions.

A PhD scholarship is available as part of an exciting research collaboration between the Faculty of Information Technology (FIT), the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences (MNHS) and indigenous communities in rural Victoria.

Collaborative problem-solving (CPS) has widely been recognised as an essential skill for success in the 21st century. Because of this, many researchers have focused on trying to better understand CPS in efforts to find out when it is effective, when it is not, and how to make it a teachable skill. 

People with disabilities are excluded from the assistive technology creation process because the methods and tools that are used are inaccessible. This leads to missed opportunities to create more accessible technologies for everyone including assistive technologies. This project will engage people with disabilities in the technology creation process at many levels, from engagement activities, input into designs and creation of technology and the facilitation of independent making of assistive technologies.

Recent advances in technology mean we can now reappraise the exploration of the past as a future-aligned endeavour. The definition of the ‘past’ here is broad; the reconstruction of a bygone world may derive from relatively recent written texts or photographic archives, from centuries old remains uncovered in archaeological excavations, or even far back in ‘deep time’, to the long-vanished ecologies evidenced in the fossil record.

The project involves design, implementation and evaluation of rule-based chatbot to support students when they study information from multiple texts, e.g., reading a few articles about global warming. The bot will support students' self-regulated learning skills which were theorised to promote learning achievements and boost motivation.

This research will unfold over the following 3 phases:

1. Reviewing the literature on self-regulated learning and creating a set of responses from the bot

2. Developing rule-based chatbot

This project seeks to explore the use of 3D printing to provide better access to graphical information to those who are blind or have low vision.

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.

As part of the establishment grant for the Monash Assistive Technology and Society (MATS) Centre (https://www.monash.edu/mats/about), the Faculty of IT is providing a scholarship to support the Centre activities.