Professor Margot Brereton

DO YOU NEED RESEARCH EXPERIENCE?  I currently supervise a vibrant cohort of PhD students and postdoctoral fellows. If you are interested in PhD, honours, Masters or postdoctoral research study, please contact me. In particular I am looking for students to work and to train in research on the funded  projects below.  Scholarships are available for qualified candidates. If you have skills/interests in design, user-centeed research, tangible interaction, visualisation, ethnographic research, participatory design, electronics design, app development,  IT  or software engineering,  and want to further develop your research skills through higher degree research, please do get in touch.

1. INTERACTION DESIGN WITH YOUNG CHILDREN (0-8) : As part fo the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child, we are researching and co-designing technology use by and in the homes of children with intellectual disability. We are also researching how technologies might better to engage children with the wonders of nature and the outdoors, and engage them in creative and computational thinking to address environmental matters. Scholarships are available for students interested in these areas.
2. HUMAN INTERACTION WITH AI AND MACHINE LEARNING: Our goal Is to change the design of machine learning and AI systems so that humans and machines use their different abilities to learn together for mutual benefit – human-machine teaming. Machine learning has been commoditised in areas such as medical image reading, however it typically operates separately from humans, supplanting human skills and leading to deskilling. Using human-computer interaction research techniques, co-design and iterative prototyping we aim to devise and evaluate exemplar systems that support humans to interactively frame problems, explore and learn, while utilising and improving machine models, leading to a guiding framework for designing human-machine teaming. Domains of investigation are radiology training, environmental monitoring, and children’s learning.
3. AMBIENT NATURE NETWORK - NEW TECHNOLOGIES TO CONNECT PEOPLE TO AND THROUGH NATURE: This project aims to reconnect people with nature through new technology. Events in nature occur at times, places and scales that are hard to witness, leading to human disconnection from nature. This project proposes to address this issue by researching and designing new low-cost devices that combine environmental sensors with new interfaces to reveal local nature in parks and gardens in calm, engaging ways within and between homes in medium and high density environments. Outcomes will include new connected devices, playful interfaces and social sharing mechanisms, an evaluation with local groups, and a new theory of technology supported human-nature interaction. Benefits will include better community connection to nature, engagement in local citizen science, environmental initiatives and novel monitoring services and products.
4. CO-DESIGNING ACTIVITIES AND TECHNOLOGIES TO REVITALISE AUSTRALIAN INDIGENOUS LANGUAGES: This project aims to understand how an Australian Indigenous language, Kuku Yalanji, is used across inter-generational settings and how to foster its use in everyday activities and with technologies. Many Indigenous languages, primarily spoken by Elders in small communities, risk being lost in a few decades together with the rich knowledge and cultural identity they embody. This project will use a community co-design research approach to understand language use and barriers and co-create new technologies and activities for everyday language use. Outcomes will be new knowledge about language use and revitalisation in small communities, new language tools, and Indigenous proto-enterprises at the intersection of culture, language and design. Other Australian languages may be considered.
5. MAKE AND CONNECT: ENABLING PEOPLE TO CONNECT THROUGH THEIR THINGS: The Internet of Things promises a future in which everyday objects are all connected to the internet enabling them to share data and communicate with one another. The vision is technology centric and the technology is difficult to build. We will research how internet enabled things can be designed and built by everyone young and old, with a domain focus on enabling social engagement and connectedness of older people and distributed families through new forms of connectedness. Outcomes will be new toolkits, a theoretical model, and example networks of objects connecting people in new ways.
6. NEW INFORMATION ACCESS AND SOCIAL TECHNOLOGIES FOR NEURODIVERSE PEOPLE:   This project aims to co-design new interfaces and algorithms for information seeking with people with diverse cognitive and sensory systems, creating web search technologies that are  accessible to all. Information access is key to independence in making choices in everyday living, however it is still not possible for many people with cognitive and sensory impairments in Australia. The project will demonstrate the value of diversity in IT design processes by engaging neurodiverse people in all steps of the process, through interviews, focus groups and iterative prototype testing. Outcomes will be new, inclusive search technologies and social technologies, and a new theoretical framework characterising the new forms of inclusive interactive social search. This project will result in new technologies for searching information and socialising on the web that will improve quality of life of people with neurodiversity, providing independence and social and cultural integration. It will generate new search engine algorithms  and new interfaces that will benefit all users of search engines still struggling to abstract their information needs to suit current technologies, and demonstrate the value of diversity in inclusive design.

My Experience

• Discipline Leader - Computer Human Interaction at Queensland  University of Technology
• Recipient of 10 Australian Research Council grants.
• 230 peer reviewed research publications
• Deployment of innovative long term functioning prototypes in several communities e.g Nnub digital noticeboard system, Rhub group mobile social software, and to come…. the Messaging Kettle (or Messaging Rice Cooker, or Message Sticks) which will be deployed to connect families between UK and Australia, within Indonesia and within Aboriginal families in Australia
• 20 PhD and 2Masters students graduated (6 from University of Queensland (my former workplace) and 14 from QUT) (Aloha May Ambe, Cara Wilson, Tshering Dema, Jennyfer Lawrence Taylor, Ravihansa Rajapakse, Haziq Abdullah, Ben Matthews, Jared Donovan, Clint Heyer, Fiona Redhead, Tim Cederman-Haysom, Brett Campbell, Ellya Zulhaikha, Hadi Mirisaee, Steve Snow, Amirudin Wahab, Irith Williams, Kate Vaisutis)
• Chair of OzCHI, Australian Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, 2010, 2017
• OzCHI Doctoral Colloquium Responder/Chair, 2006-2009 , 2011, 2012, 2019
• Chief Investigator, ARC Centre for the Digital Child, Key Researcher in the CRC for Interaction Design.
• Reviewing: ACM CHI, conference on Computer Human Interaction; PDC Participatory Design, DIS Designing Interactive Systems; Journal of Computer Supported Co-operative Work; OzCHI; The International Journal of Research in Engineering Design; Design Studies; ASME Design Theory and Methodology; CoDesigning; Design of Augmented Reality; Environments; DesignExpertise; Designing User Experience (DUX); ISWC (International Symposium on Wearable Computing); AUIC. European Commission.
• 2004 - Present: Member of the Editorial Board, CoDesign.
• ACM CHI Best paper award 2014
• ACM Highly Commended Paper Award, 2014, 2021
• QUT Vice-Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research and Teaching 2019