Research projects in Information Technology

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 Monash Assistive Technology and Society (MATS) Centre helps people living with disabilities to lead self-directed lives. Emerging assistive technologies have the potential to break down many of the barriers that people with disabilities face at school, university, work and in the social sphere. Our work is guided by on-the-ground partnerships with the community to ensure we’re addressing real problems faced by real people and creating a lasting impact. Join us and help to create a world that is more inclusive and equitable.

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…

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”.

Museums are – and have always been – mixed reality spaces par excellence. Today, digital technologies extend the ways in which the wealth of material culture they contain can be interpreted and exhibited, presenting new and (previously) unimaginable ways of bringing their stories to life.

Technologies emerge from a society’s cultural imagination, sparking new ways to imagine the future. Today, Artificial Intelligence (AI) – as the technical capability of a system ‘to correctly interpret external data, to learn from such data, and to use those learnings to achieve specific goals and tasks through flexible adaptation’ [1] – is formed into virtually any digital system that we draw upon to interact with each other and the world around us.

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. This project focuses on embodied integration, where a computer tightly integrates with the person’s body. 

#digitalhealth

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. 

An interest and experience with water-based activities, interactive technology, hardware prototyping (including actuators), human movement/performance and aquatic culture (including diving) is desirable. This work is in collaboration with Dr. Sarah Jane Pell (sarahjanepell.com).