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 680 matching student topics
Displaying 145–156 of 680 results
Very high-speed dynamic motion planning for arm robots
Robot manipulator arms are increasingly used for logistics applications. These typically require robots to run at the limits of their performance: motor torque and motor velocity. Added challenges include significant payloads (if we are schlepping heavy parcels) with apriori unknown mass, the possibility of boxes detaching from the gripper under high acceleration, and fixed obstacles in the workspace. How can we determine the limits to performance, quickly identify the payload mass, then plan the fastest path to get from A to B.
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Implicit representations for place recognition and robot localisation
This project will develop a novel localization pipeline based on implicit map representations. Unlike traditional approaches that use explicit representations like point clouds or voxel grids, the map in our project is represented implicitly in the weights of neural networks such as Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). You will get a chance to develop a new class of localization algorithms that work directly on the implicit representation, bypassing the costly rendering step from implicit to explicit representation. The designed algorithms will …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
Identifying Indigenous contributions to knowledge
The Australian Census collects data every ten years to reflect who we are as a nation. But the data collected by the Census only tells part of our story.Indigenous people lived in Australia for thousands of years before the arrival of European settlers, accumulating a wealth of knowledge about Australia's land, climate, flora and fauna. Researchers have only begun tapping this knowledge as the basis for modern scientific research.This project will combine machine learning and text-analytics tools to develop a …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
The effects of trust on government operations
For a government to operate efficiently, the trust of its constituents, as well as the global community, is considered to be of substantial importance. A lack of trust could impair the government’s ability to effectively manage and fund its operations from collecting taxes and external investment. However, further research is required to understand the underlying trust mechanisms and their influence on governments’ performance. To address this research gap, the project will examine how trust in government is determined, evaluate how …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Accountancy
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Future Enterprise
Continuous time samplers (MCMC at the limit!)
The goal of this project is to develop new continuous time Monte Carlo methods for efficient sampling from high-dimensional distributions. Continuous-time Monte Carlo methods are a class of algorithms that use continuous-time dynamics to generate samples from target distributions, rather than the discrete-time dynamics used in traditional Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods. These methods have been shown to have faster mixing and better exploration of the state space, making them particularly appealing samplers for challenging distributions.The main objectives of …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Microfluidic chip-based tumor-immune cancer models for biomarker discovery
In-vitro profiling of tumour-immune cell interactions in proximity can provide valuable insight into patient response to new combinatorial immunotherapies that are in the pipeline and currently being tested in clinical trials. These in-vitro models allow for a more controlled and isolated environment and provide a methodical approach for generating quantifiable data characterizing the interactions between target and effector cells. Traditionally executed in well-plates, tumour-immune models have been slowly moving towards a microfluidic chip-based approach for several reasons: better control over …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Mechanical, Medical and Process Engineering
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Biomedical Technologies
Unlocking the Potential of Simplex-Truncated Distributions
This PhD project aims to develop new methods for generating random samples from a specific type of probability distributions called simplex-truncated distributions. These distributions are commonly used in various fields such as statistics, machine learning, and biology.The project will involve the development of new techniques to generate random samples from simplex-truncated distributions. These techniques are based on a method called continuous-time Monte Carlo which is a cutting edge method in statistics that can generate random samples from complex distributions.The main …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Mathematical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Data Science
Mapping the world: understanding the environment through spatio-temporal implicit representations
Accurately mapping large-scale infrastructure assets (power poles, bridges, buildings, whole suburbs and cities) is still exceptionally challenging for robots.The problem becomes even harder when we ask robots to map structures with intricate geometry or when the appearance or the structure of the environment changes over time, for example due to corrosion or construction activity.The problem difficulty is increased even more when sensor data from a range of different sensors (e.g. lidars and cameras, but also more specialised hardware such as …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Engineering
- School
- School of Electrical Engineering and Robotics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Robotics
Low-cost portable Magnetic Resonance Imaging for clinical applications
The aim of this project is to develop accurate low-cost medical imaging methodology for pseudo-3D mapping of Mammographic Density (MD) within the breast. MD is the degree of radio-opacity (“whiteness”) in an X-ray mammogram. It has implications for breast cancer risk, ease of detection of breast cancer, and monitoring of the efficacy of hormonal breast cancer prevention or anti-cancer treatments.Healthcare ChallengeThere is a growing need for affordable and accurate quantitative assessment of MD without ionising radiation. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
Genome to phenome: exploiting multi-omics and deep learning strategies to decipher importance of isoforms in health and behaviour
The molecular process that leads to multiple mRNA transcripts being produced from the same segment of DNA (aka gene) is known as alternative splicing (AS). This is a common form of regulation in higher eukaryotes, enabling the production of novel protein isoforms, which in turn are known to have a big impact on phenotype. Understanding the regulatory factors involved in AS, including epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation, will offer key insights into important biological phenomena (health disease, behaviour, production). …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Biology and Environmental Science
Preventing arterial catheter-related harm in intensive care
Each year more than 200,000 patients (adults and children) are admitted to intensive care units (ICU) in Australia and New Zealand for treatment of serious and life-threatening injury or illness, or recovery from major surgery. The vast majority (~90%) of ICU patients will require an arterial catheter during their admission to optimise vital treatment and monitoring. Arterial catheters are small hollow plastic tubes inserted into peripheral arteries to facilitate continuous haemodynamic monitoring (e.g. blood-pressure) and frequent blood sampling. Hence, effective …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Nursing
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Healthcare Transformation
Prescriptive process analytics
With growing significance of data there is a need to harness the potential of that data for improved business operations. Historical data is often to provide a descriptive overview of how business processes have performed in the past. However, there is a need to be proactive and take appropriate actions to ensure that business processes perform in an optimal manner. Prescriptive analytics is a process that analyzes data and provides instant recommendations on how to optimize business practices. Prescriptive analytics …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Information Systems
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