Research projects in Information Technology

Interest is growing in powering data centres by energy generated from renewable sources to reduce high operational cost and carbon footprint. In 2017, Google achieved a major milestone of purchasing 100% renewable energy to match its data centres annual electricity consumption. However, efficient utilisation of renewable energy is a challenging problem due to the variable and intermittent nature of both workload demand and renewable energy supply.

This project aims to build an automated bird repellent system to detect and identify pest birds and repel them from the farming area by frightening them. An Edge computing platform is embedded in a network of devices to bring application execution close to the data source and overcome challenges with high volumes of data and the need for automated, near real-time system responsiveness. The arrangement of electricity for devices in farming areas is also challenging. Thus, we intend to make our system fully off-grid by the deployment of solar-powered devices.

Today's society and its organisations are becoming ever-increasingly dependent upon Information and Communication Technology systems, mostly based in cloud datacentres. Powering these datacentres with energy generated from renewable energy resources is of critical interest. This project develops essential knowledge to help design and operate datacentres capable of efficiently using renewable energy. The innovative techniques and software systems developed within this project will lead to substantial reductions in operational costs and greenhouse gas emission by datacentres.

In multicultural societies diversity is a valuable asset. However, diversity faces critical challenges from extremism: the adoption of radical beliefs that are rejected by the mainstream.

This project aims to develop a model to explain the way in which conflicting beliefs divide societies into extremes, ultimately leading to the formation of ideology-based clusters, such as terrorist cells. These can occur in real world and online settings.

This project explores the role of technology in facilitating playful eating experiences, developing a novel understanding of how interactive technology can – and should – be designed to promote positive eating experiences. 

The rise of technology that supports a partnership between user and computer highlights an opportunity for a new era of “human-computer integration”, contrasting the previously dominant paradigm of computers functioning as tools.

There is an opportunity to prototype interactive muscle memory systems and study their use in order to understand what designers can learn from remembering activities that involve the active human body in regard to designing interactive systems. 

There is an opportunity to prototype digital water play systems and examine users’ aquatic body-environment interactions to derive an understanding of digital technology’s opportunities to facilitate novel bodily water play interactions in-water, on-water and underwater. 

With drones getting smaller and smaller, we regard them as physical pixels that can be placed anywhere in space, allowing us to experience digital content in the physical world in novel playful ways.

There is an opportunity to enrich indoor rock-climbing or bouldering through interactive technology. This project builds on prior work and combines bouldering with Hololens and motion capture.