QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 239 matching student topics
Displaying 25–36 of 239 results
Understanding international governance in Antarctica through cooperative game theory
Antarctica is governed by a coalition of 29 countries ('consultative parties') who must agree unanimously before a law can be passed. This project will apply theories from social network analysis and cooperative game theory to map relationships between the different parties, and to predict their behaviour on a series of important environmental issues.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Using catastrophe theory to prepare for global warming in Antarctica
According to dynamical systems theory, crises occur because couplings within a system (geophysical, ecological and social) create instabilities. Nonlinear feedbacks means that relatively small changes in circumstances can cause a rapid change to the system state. For example, a small increase in tourism visitors could lead to the invasion of a new species. Or, a gradual change in the average global temperature could lead to the collapse of Antarctic ice-shelves.In the coming decade, the Antarctic and sub-Antarctic are likely to …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Searching for Life on Mars on Earth
NASA's newest Mars rover, Perseverance, has just arrived on the red planet. Tasked with searching for ancient life in the geological record of a ~4 billion-year-old crater lake, the mission science team must use our only available analogue - the Earth - as their guide to exploration.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
Probing the origins of life on Earth
The history of life on Earth is written in the fossil record. In this project, you will investigate stable isotope evidence for extremely early evolving organisms. Through careful petrography and with the use of isotope ratio mass-spectrometers, you will help unravel the history of microbial metabolisms that powered the ecosystems recorded by 3 billion-year-old microbial fossils.
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
5G and IoT smart ontology learning
This project aims to investigate privacy preservation protocols in a 5G integrated IoT environment through an analysis of the depth of smart-device use in common smart domains. 5G’s addition to IoT-based smart devices will be effectively deployed and utilised by a large majority of individual and organisation-based users. The knowledge-based ontology and tools developed in the project will help form the new privacy preservation mechanisms that are required for the 5G enabled environment.The development of an ontology for 5G enabled …
- Study level
- PhD, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Conversational agents that can see
The development of conversational agents, whether as smart home devices, or embedded in mobile devices or social robots, has started in the world of chatbots, with only text available, and then started to build audio features, and finally considering context through sensors and cloud knowledge, as well as offering images in response to a query.However, little attention has been paid to other conversational modalities, such as showing, pointing, or gesturing. The reliance on these is exacerbated in conversation with people …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
Modelling and managing uncertain Antarctic species networks
Antarctic ecosystems are complex, and data is limited since it is expensive to collect. Species including penguins, seabirds, invertebrates, mosses, and marine species interact in food webs which can be modelled as mathematical networks. These networks can be large, span across terrestrial and marine systems, and are changing in response to environmental changes.These ecological networks can be modelled using differential equation predator prey models like Lotka-Volterra to describe these interactions. However, the relationships between species are not always known, or …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Centre for the Environment
Optimising bone shape with memory networks
Bone is a dynamic tissue that optimises its shape to the mechanical loads that it carries. Bone mass is accrued where loads are high, and reduced where loads are low. This adaptation of bone tissue to mechanical loads is well-known and observed in many instances. However, what serves as a reference mechanical state in this shape optimisation remains largely unknown.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Praeclarus process-data quality framework
Praeclarus is an open-source software framework that aims to facilitate data pre-processing for process mining. Process mining is specialised data mining focusing on process-data. It is of high interest to industry, with the market doubling every two years (e.g., increasing from $550M in 2020 to $1B in 2022). This market increase has meant that big companies like Microsoft, SAP, and IBM are acquiring process mining vendors such is Minit, Signavio, and myInvenio.Recent process mining surveys show that more than 60% …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
Playing Tetris with Australian threatened species
Many of Australia's threatened species can only avoid extinction if we keep them on islands or behind fences, where foxes and cats can't kill them all. We call these places "safe havens".Some species can only exist in some safe havens. Maybe they need particular habitats, or particular temperatures, and these can't be found everywhere.Some pairs of species can't live together. Maybe one is a predator of another. Maybe they fight too much.So, we need to find a way to put …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for the Environment
Optimisation of piezoelectric materials for robotics applications
Piezoelectricity, which translates to “pressure electricity”, is the phenomenon in which certain materials convert mechanical energy to electrical energy, and vice versa. Such materials are common-place and are used in a variety of applications including sensor, actuator, and energy harvesting technologies. The capabilities of such piezoelectric materials have not yet been fully realised. We plan to use computational structural optimisation to design new piezoelectric materials and components that may contribute to novel sensing technologies for robotics applications. Essentially, robots need …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
Information retrieval and coding methods for large scale bioinformatics
Advances in sequencing technologies over the past two decades have led to an explosion in the availability of genomic sequence data and an increasingly urgent need for scalable clustering and search facilities. One approach is to encode sequences as binary vectors in a high-dimensional space, simplifying the comparison and allowing it to be computed very rapidly using bit-level operations.Coupled with these ideas is the need to provide clustering methods and efficient indexing and lookup in response to search queries. One …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Contact us
If you have questions about the best options for you, the application process, your research topic, finding a supervisor or anything else, get in touch with us today.