Research projects in Information Technology

Mobile and continuous health monitoring has seen major advancements in recent years. The capabilities of current mobile phones and their built-in sensors have inspired many mobile sensing applications for monitoring individuals' health, activities and social behaviour. Yet, there is a lack of common and standard guidelines in developing mobile sensing apps (from both software development and UI perspectives) and their evaluation. 

Current federated learning architectures in mobile healthcare are limited to a centralised model without considering the full continuum of mobile-edge-cloud. Additionally, to support different data privacy needs of patients as well as the limitations of mobile environments, there is a need for considering a multi-level federated learning architecture for the mobile-edge-cloud continuum.

Chronic conditions are becoming a serious global and national health problem. Recommendation systems play an important role in supporting patients in managing their long-term health issues. They generally rely on expert rules or machine learning models to provide health advice. Recently, generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, have become a popular focus of research. In healthcare, they show strong potential to facilitate the process of generating health-related advice without the need for predefined rules or training data. Yet, their reliability remains a serious concern. 

Diabetes can be effectively controlled by maintaining a healthy diet, well-managed blood glucose level and regular physical activity. Evidence suggests that improving dietary habits can play a crucial role in preventing the onset or progression of diabetes. A large number of mobile apps have been recently introduced to assist individuals with self-management of diabetes. However, these studies often provide dietary advice based on the average responses of groups to specific foods, rather than considering individual glycemic responses.

Research data governance is an under-explored issue, and technical infrastructures to support the transparency and control of data collected in human research studies (from medicine to social sciences) focus primarily on the researchers rather than the people whose data has been collected. While data protection legislation worldwide is increasingly regulating what companies can do with their customers' data and providing legal mechanisms for customers to access and control such data, the same cannot be said for data collected in research studies.

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.

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.

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