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 477 matching student topics
Displaying 49–60 of 477 results
Using time-controlled grazing to sequester carbon in Queensland rangelands
Time-controlled grazing (TCG), or cell grazing is a management strategy in which cattle are stocked and rotated across small paddocks or “cells” according to fodder availability. Grazing takes place in short durations at high stocking densities, in an effort to mimic the grazing patterns of wild ungulate herds.This management strategy has gained traction in recent years due to claims that it improves both pasture productivity and diversity, whilst also increasing long-term carbon pools. Limited data is available on the impact …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Co-benefits of trees on farms: soil carbon
Soils are now in the ‘front line’ of global environmental change. Soils are the largest global pool of actively cycling organic C and N. Maintaining and increasing soil organic matter (SOM) is a prominent strategy for mitigating atmospheric CO2 and adapting agriculture to climate change.At the same time the global biodiversity crisis has led to increased scrutiny on supply chains to scrutinise farms ecological footprint. Planting or retaining trees in the landscape has the opportunity to achieve both outcomes, however …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Agriculture and the Bioeconomy
Flexible thermoelectrics for wearable electronics
Advancements in miniaturisation and integration of electronics have recently stimulated the explosive progress in wearable electronics. With increasing practical needs, our analysis has indicated that the market values of wearable electronics are predicted to boost up to US$50B in 2022 and US$72B in 2026. Currently, conventional batteries have limited applications in wearable electronics due to their requirements of frequent replacement/recharge and extra-maintenance. This is especially true in temperature or pressure sensors in some circumstances such as remote-control smart home systems …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
High energy absorbing materials and composites for building protection from collision damage
Protection of structures has become a priority for saving lives and preventing structural collapses caused by increased natural or man-made disasters. Most injuries and mortalities in these disasters are caused due to fragmentation of structures, and therefore, structural protection through systems that can absorb more energy and effectively contain the fragments (debris) are needed. Additive manufacturing (such as 3D printing) can be used to develop special geometries called auxetic geometries and composites using sustainable bioplastics which can absorb shock energy …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Drone and satellite Artificial Intelligence
Satellite and drone/UAV data has a great potential to provide large-scale analytics for many domain applications. However, the wide range of data of diverse nature (e.g., optical vs. SAR, high-resolution vs. wide-coverage, mono- vs. hyper-spectral, 2-D vs. 3-D) also poses significant challenges for analytics.Deep learning holds great promise to deal with these tasks. While the number of research in this area is increasing, there still exists challenges such as co-learning of multimodal data, limited data annotation, and uncertainty in the …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Identifying corporate tax avoidance
It is not possible to empirically measure, with certainty, a corporation’s level of tax avoidance due to a lack of publicly available information. As such, academic studies that seek to identify determinants, moderators and consequences of corporate tax avoidance, in order to evaluate the equity of the tax system (Callihan, 1994), measure corporate tax avoidance by proxy suggesting a wide variety of calculations.But these calculations have limitations. For example, most proxies measure non conforming (transactions that are accounted for differently …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Accountancy
Capture and reuse of phosphate nutrients
Nutrients such as ammonium and phosphate species are essential in agriculture. However, release of excessive amounts of nutrients to waterways may result in eutrophication which can lead to toxic algae blooms, killing of fish and destruction of the environment.Compounding this issue is the fact that phosphate rock sources are gradually being exhausted. Hence, finding a means to capture and reuse phosphate species from sources such as wastewater treatment plants is potentially attractive.Consequently, this project involves the development of new phosphate …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Evidence-driven policy innovation for urban heat islands
Extreme heatwaves and other extreme weather events are contributing to the fragility of cities and urban infrastructure, which requires urgent attention. Urban heat islands are an exemplar for metropolitan fragile areas, which exacerbate the impact of climate change and global warming on natural hazards, such as wildfires, storms, floods, and droughts, which pose a critical threat to Australian and international communities (Degirmenci et al., 2021). Decision support systems (DSS) can help city planners and policymakers to optimise their decision-making by …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Management
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Future Enterprise
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
Artificial Intelligence for collaborative and intelligent user interfaces
This project seeks to leverage recent advances in machine vision and natural language processing algorithms to support the design and development of knowledge-driven applications that support communication and collaborations with their users.One particular area where this will be investigated is in workplaces for supported employment, that is employment opportunities for people with intellectual disability. One of the questions to address is how machines could respond to what a user shows them in order to assist with decision making in a …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Computer Science
Low Cost Catalysts for Biofuels Production
As the world transitions from fossil fuels to biomass based fuels there is a corresponding drive to create new technologies to enable this situation to come to fruition.Biofuels represent one option in terms of mitigating the impacts of global warming.The conversion of biomass to biofuels typically requires a catalyst. Many different materials have been investigated, with zeolites showing considerable promise.However, zeolite catalysts can be expensive and thus there is a challenge to create new catalysts which are low cost.This project …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
Polymer theranostics for nanomedicine
The personalised treatment of disease though nanomedicine will allow for more effective and safer treatments for patients. Polymer theranostics provide for the simultaneous detection of disease, treatment, and monitoring of therapeutic response. Our research group synthesises new polymeric materials and investigates how they can be used in applications such as:potent antivirals to fight future pandemicsthe effect of radiation on materials for improved radiotherapy for cancerresponsive imaging agents that can report on metabolic processes of diseasecharacterizing the interaction of polymeric materials …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
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