Research projects in Information Technology

A PhD is available for an Australian citizen with our industry partner The AiLECS Lab. The project is Detecting Threats in Temporal Networks. The project aims to better understand communications in networks of criminal activity.

This will be led by OPTIMA AI Dr John Betts and OPTIMA CI Prof. Peter Stuckey at Monash University, and Dr Janis Dalins and Dr Campbell Wilson at The AiLECS Lab.

Brief description of the project:

This project will develop novel AI-augmented gaming coaching and National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) reporting methods for Crank Crew members with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), psychosocial and other barriers. Moreover, the quality of these methods will be assessed in the context of improved coaching, NDIS reporting efficiencies and Crew member outcomes.

Seizure prediction algorithms will be developed using the one-of-a-kind ultra-long-term human intracranial EEG dataset obtained from the Neurovista Corporation clinical trial of their Seizure Advisory System, or data from other implantable or wearable devices. This involves consideration of both feature-based machine learning or data science approaches and neural mass parameter estimation approaches to classify the EEG and predict seizures. Recent approaches focus on critical slowing as a marker for seizure susceptability and the influence of brain rhythms.

Planning is the reasoning side of acting in Artificial Intelligence. Planning automates the selection and the organisation of actions to reach desired states of the world as best as possible. For many real-world planning problems however, it is difficult to obtain a transition model that governs state evolution with complex dynamics.

SCIPPlan is a mathematical optimisation based automated planner for domains with i) mixed (i.e., real and/or discrete valued) state and action spaces, ii) nonlinear state transitions that are functions of time, and iii) general reward functions. SCIPPlan iteratively i) finds violated constraints (i.e., zero-crossings) by simulating the state transitions, and ii) adds the violated constraints back to its underlying optimization model, until a valid plan is found.

Optimisation methods, such as mixed integer linear programming, have been very successful at decision-making for more than 50 years. Optimisation algorithms support basically every industry behind the scenes and the simplex algorithm is one of the top 10 most influential algorithms. Major success stories include rostering nurses in hospitals, managing chains of organ transplants, planning production levels for manufacturing, routing delivery trucks for transport, scheduling power stations and electricity grids, to name just a few.

Transport and logistics businesses today use a large fleet of trucks and vans to deliver packages widely across a city. Deciding which package should be loaded on to which vehicle and deciding which package should be prioritised are surprisingly difficult computational tasks. State-of-the-art high-performance algorithms are used to calculate routes for the vehicles in order to minimise costs and maximise efficiency.

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