Research projects in Information Technology

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.

This practice-based research involves further development of the AirSticks, a hardware/software package which allows the triggering and manipulation of sound and visuals in a 3D playing space, as a gestural instrument for live electronic music performance, music education and general health and wellbeing in collaboration with our interdisciplinary team at SensiLab. This can be done through new performances, new software or new hardware. How can we reinvent the connect between our bodies, our ears and our creativity, and what new applications for the AirSticks can be discovered?

Advanced strongly typed languages like Haskell and emerging type systems like refinement types (as implemented in Liquid Haskell) offer strong guarantees about the correctness of programs.  However, when type errors occur it can be difficult for programmers to understand their cause.  Such errors are particularly confusing for people learning the language.  The situation is not helped by the cryptic error messages often produced by compilers.

We live and work in a world of complex relationships between data, systems, knowledge, people, documents, biology, software, society, politics, commerce and so on.  We can model these relationships as networks or graphs in the hope of reasoning about them - but the tools that we have for understanding such network structured data (whether algorithmic analytics or visualisation tools) remain crude.  Emerging display and interaction devices such as augmented and virtual reality headsets offer new ways to visualise and interact with data in the world around us rather than on screens.  This…

When designing user interfaces, developers want to be able to position objects in a structured way such that controls are clear and neat.  In the past, absolute positioning and grids have been used for this purpose.  However, such rigid layout doesn’t now allow adaptive layout for interfaces that run on a variety of screen sizes or that need different control sizes due to application being internationalised into foreign languages.  For this reason, Apple introduced constraint-based GUI layout under the name Auto Layout for iOS developers.  With…

Digital versions of technical documents, like textbooks and academic papers, are usually produced as static PDF files. Research has shown that working with these on electronic devices is frustrating and inefficient, partly because people do not read such documents in a linear fashion as they do novels.

This PhD project will investigate how existing book contents (text and graphics/animations) can be automatically translated into accessible eBook formats with minimum human intervention. It will be part of the Books for the Vision Impaired and the GraVVITAS frameworks (www.monash.edu/it/inclusive-tech). The project will employ computer vision, image processing and human computer interaction techniques. It may also include hardware development of wearable assistive devices that use audio and haptic feedback. 

I am seeking PhD candidates interested in working on designing Learning Analytics or similar reflection interfaces that automatically highlight design elements of data visualisations and generate narrative to communicate insights (instead of just plotting data).

I am seeking PhD candidates interested in designing and connecting Multimodal Learning Analytics solutions according to the pedagogical needs and contextual constraints of teamwork occurring across physical and digital spaces.