Research projects in Information Technology

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.

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.   

This project will explore the use of Mixed-Reality (MR) headset technology to support people in performing maintenance tasks in complex environments, where the nature of the work involves close inspection of and interaction with mechanical devices.  Examples might include aircraft maintenance or other complex workshop environments.  We term work in such situations as "physically embedded" in that the nature of the workflow and the information and data associated with the work is closely tied to the physical machinery.  Such maintenance support requires providing the worker with timely and…

This project could suit a candidate with a background in the socio-technical area of IM or IT, or could be tackled from a range of technical perspectives.

One example of the kind of work a suitable candidate could undertake is in support of the NEED collaboration - which at the Australian end is being run out of FIT. In the NEED setting, questions of inequity in healthcare and wellness act as the starting point for considering digital health opportunities and solutions. 

Contemporary filmmakers and visual artists alike are embracing the potential of immersive digital technology – such as Augmented and Virtual Reality – to tell stories in powerful, new and affective ways. By effectively breaking the dictatorship of the frame that has defined the representational form of the moving image for the past 150 years, VR introduces a new paradigm for cinematic expression and viewing experience. This challenge marks a transformational moment in the evolution in the craft of “immersive storytelling”.