Research projects in Information Technology

There are many approaches to hypothesis testing.  The well-known approach of p-values has been drawn into question and even controversy in more recent years, even though criticisms reportedly date back at least as far as 1954 (Dowe, 2008a, sec. 1, pp549-550).

Discussion of how to do this using the Bayesian information-theoretic minimum message length (MML) approach (Wallace and Boulton, 1968; Wallace and Dowe, 1999a; Wallace, 2005) are given in Dowe (2008a, section 0.2.5, page 539, and section 0.2.2, page 528), and Dowe (2011, pages 919 and 964).

The recent discovery in 2015 of gravitational waves from colliding black holes and neutron stars has opened a new window on the Universe. Astrophysicists can now “see the unseeable” -- black holes that emit no light are regularly being observed through their gravitational-wave signatures. Since the first discovery in 2015, more than 50 black hole mergers, two neutron star mergers, and two neutron star-black hole collisions have been observed.

Graphs or networks are effective tools to representing a variety of data in different domains. In the biological domain, chemical compounds can be represented as networks, with atoms as nodes and chemical bonds as edges. Analysis these networks are important as they may provide AI-based approaches for drug discovery. This project will focus on representing and inferring chemical or biological networks as a form of relational and structural learning.

 Automation has affected employment at least as far back as Gutenberg, the introduction of the printing press and the effect on scribes and others. Such changes have occurred in the centuries since. In more recent times, we see electronic intelligence showing increasingly rapid advances, with examples including (e.g.) easily accessible, free, rapid and often somewhat reliable language translation. More recent advances include the increasing emergence of driverless cars.

    DNA or RNA motif discovery is a popular biological method to identify over-represented DNA or RNA sequences in next generation sequencing experiments. These motifs represent the binding site of transcription factors or RNA-binding proteins. DNA or RNA binding sites are often variable. However, all motif discovery tools report redundant motifs that poorly represent the biological variability of the same motif, hence renders the identification of the binding protein difficult.

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is one of the most significant and immediate threats to health in Australia and globally. As an Infectious Diseases physician and researcher, the second supervisor is working on harnessing new technologies such as next-generation sequencing and artificial intelligence to improve the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of AMR infections. The specific aims of this project are:

There are sometimes emerging prolonged periods of highly persistent evolution in time series.

Education, undoubtedly, is one of the most fundamental means for people to gain personal and professional development. Given its importance, both researchers and practitioners have endeavored to apply various technologies to construct numerous educational systems and tools to facilitate teaching and learning in the past decades. For instance, with the development of Web technology, a large number of online learning platforms and web-based learning management systems have been developed and deployed for use, e.g., Khan Academy, Coursera, edX, Moodle, and Blackboard.

Species’ distributions are shifting in response to global climate change and other human pressures. Accurate methods to monitor and predict distribution shifts are urgently needed to manage threatened species and ecosystems, and to control invasive species and diseases. This requires a step-change in the data and methods used to monitor and predict organism behaviours and ultimately shifts in species' distributions.

This PhD project is funded by a successful ARC Discovery Project grant: "Improving human reasoning with causal Bayesian networks: a user-centric, multimodal, interactive approach" and the successful applicant will work as part of a larger research team.