Summer (Vacation) Scholarships offered by the School of IT & NICTA
NICTA Scholarship N1: Privacy in Online Social Networks
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Anirban Mahanti and Dr Sebastien Ardon (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt (The University of Sydney)
Over the past few years, online social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and Twitter have enjoyed tremendous success with million of users logging onto these services on a daily basis. Users of these systems typically populate their online profile with personal information such as name, date and place of birth, and explicitly connect to other users, forming social networks. Many of these systems allow limited access to user’s information to third party, through search functions, but also through APIs such as “Facebook connect”. Providing access to user’s data to third parties create the risk of privacy leaks and/or identity theft.
This project will explore different privacy aspects of online social networks, and in particular, the privacy risks associated with cross-correlating data from different social networks. The study will first require collecting user data from several online social network, using their public API, then analysing this data using data mining techniques. Example questions of interest include the following: i) how hard is it to infer user identity by cross- correlating data from different online social networks, and ii) what are the techniques that could be used to reduce the chance of successful user identification.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N1
Analytical skills: some statistics, some graph theory
Programming, preferably in a high-level language such as Python or Ruby
NICTA Scholarship N2: Scheduling in Distributed Systems and Multi-Server HPC Environments
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Albert Zomaya (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Joachim Gudmundsson (NICTA)
Distributed systems (Clusters, Grids and Clouds) provide high performance capabilities to support a wide range of applications. These applications normally have different, and sometimes conflicting, requirements. This will necessitate the development of more flexible scheduling techniques. Another factor which is detrimental to the performance of such systems is the dynamic nature of such combination of heterogeneous resources that are, for most of the time, located in disparate locations. In addition, the availability of resources (e.g. computational, storage, etc) for some of the time does not mean that such resources will be available all the time. Such conditions will add more complexity to the design of grid or cloud computing schedulers. This also suggests the need to suites of schedulers that can be used in different operating scenarios. This project deals with the study and development of a variety of scheduling scenarios and algorithms that can help in achieving the ultimate goal of furthering our understanding of resource allocation and scheduling in distributed systems.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N2
Knowledge of C or C++ A; good grasp of Algorithms
NICTA Scholarship N3 Distributed Coalition Planning and Decision Making
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Albert Zomaya (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Joachim Gudmundsson (NICTA)
Our research in this particular area proceeds along two distinct directions. First, we are interested in one specific aspect of federating resources namely the establishment of coalitions both in a game-theoretic sense and from a generational-learning and service-centric perspective. We view coalitions as being avenues for maximizing a given (often global) objective function subject to (mostly local) constraints. Our work focuses mostly on distributed systems and coalitions of networks subject to functional mobility as opposed to physical mobility.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N3
Knowledge of C or C++ A; good grasp of Algorithms
NICTA Scholarship N4: Appearance-based re-identification of objects in video
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor David Feng (The University of Sydney), Dr Jian Zhang (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Zhiyong Wang (The University of Sydney)
This research is of prime importance in many video content management applications including video surveillance, image/video retrieval and event detection in video. The premise of this task is that given an object of the video how can we re-identify the same object based on the appearance. This is a very challenge research in the video content analysis. Student will develop their academic research skills in the area of image processing/computer vision, pattern recognition and machine learning. The theme of the research project is called “use inspired research”. The PhD project will be potentially connected to the industrial research groups for future collaborations.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N4
Advanced Math & multimedia systems
Skill Prerequisites for NICTA Scholarship N4
Good C/C++ programming skill
NICTA Scholarship N5: Objects Classification and Event Detection in Surveillance Video
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor David Feng (The University of Sydney), Dr Jian Zhang (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Sijun Lu (NICTA), Dr Zhiyong Wang (The University of Sydney)
Object classification is a further step to object detection and tracking in understanding of video. Without object classification, we can only know something is moving in the video sequences, but don’t know what it is. With the information from object tracking and classification, it may become possible to understand the activities and events happening in the video sequences. The nature of the work is software implementation to investigate the state-of-art object classification technologies for categorizing moving vehicles or human detected from the surveillance videos. The knowledge you learned from the courses of computer vision, neural network, pattern recognition and machine learning can all find their utilization in this project. Your programming skills will also be developed as you will develop a demo in software. This project is an absolute opportunity for a summer scholarship student to test his/her research capabilities for the PhD study. The project will be carried out in multimedia & video communication research group in National ICT Australia (NICTA) laboratories – Sydney Lab. You will work directly with many talent researchers in a high standard image/video lab and will be given clear guidance for work that could link to your future career development.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N5
Advanced Math & multimedia systems
Skill Prerequisites for NICTA Scholarship N5
Good C/C++ programming skill
NICTA Scholarship N6: Pedestrian Detection Using a Cascade of Boosted Classifiers
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor David Feng (The University of Sydney), Dr Jian Zhang (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Zhiyong Wang (The University of Sydney)
This project aims provide an implementation, verification and evaluation of a pedestrian detection framework proposed by Viola-Jones which is fast and robust under varying conditions by incorporating both motion and appearance in training a cascade classifiers. It is hoped that this project will serve as a foundation for other applications such as vehicle and cyclist detection; and incorporated with other image processing techniques such as tracking which would improve robustness and computational efficiency. The nature of this work will focus on software implementation based on state-of-art international conference papers. The project will be carried out in multimedia & video communication research group in National ICT Australia (NICTA) laboratories – Sydney Lab. You will work directly with many talent researchers in a high standard image/video lab and will be given clear guidance for work that could link to your future career development.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N6
Advanced Math & multimedia systems
Skill Prerequisites for NICTA Scholarship N6
Good C/C++ programming skill
NICTA Scholarship N7: Robotic cars, driving autonomously
Primary Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Lavy Libman (The University of Sydney)
The future of transportation will see a shift from dumb vehicles and intelligent drivers to intelligent vehicles and more or less dumb drivers. Ongoing research around the world aims at making vehicles intelligent enough to take over some decisions from drivers and help in difficult situations where accident risks are high. Much research in this space is of a greenfield nature and many factors are unknown until tested in experimental settings. Since it is dangerous to do initial experiments in live traffic situations it is common to resort to scaled down models for initial testing of new and novel concepts.
In this project, the aim is to test a collection of programmable sensors based on the phidgets USB based platform by building an autonomous vehicle. We will use electric radio controlled buggies with embedded Linux computers to control the phidget platform. The aim is to equip the RC car with ultrasonic radars, accelerometers, electronic compass and GPS unit and reading sensory input be able to carry out autonomous tasks such as avoiding obstacles and follow other leading vehicles. The outcome is a working prototype autonomous vehicle and an evaluation of the programming environment / development platform for further experiments.
If you enjoy programming and want to have fun over the holidays
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N7
The project is primarily programming based. The phidgets platform provides programming APIs and there is only a small level of hardware close activities involved, primarily with the electronic compass. It is necessary to have solid experience and command of C to carry out this project. The vacation scholar need also be good at writing up documentation of the produced code, and instructions on how to make future expansions / changes to the developed libraries.
NICTA Scholarship N8: Cognitive Load Analysis in Pen Interaction
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Fang Chen (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Vera Chung (The University of Sydney)
Cognitive load is variously described as the level of perceived mental effort associated with thinking and reasoning in a human. Tasks performed under stressful conditions, or requiring complex hand/eye coordination, can markedly increase cognitive load, and thus potentially interfere with other thought processes and consequently reduce overall task performance.
Feasibility and efficiency of pen interaction is an interesting problem that has been extensively studied in the scenario of multimodal interfaces. However, little research exists investigating how pen gestures and handwriting inputs can be used to automatically estimate the cognitive load of a user in real-time. Little is known about what types of gesture/handwriting features and what types of underling modelling would be appropriate.
The electronic map, as an information intensive media, provides many possibilities of pen-based interaction, where pen gestures could include clicking, drawing, tracking or much more complex traces. However, as the information organised on a map resides in different levels of a hierarchy, users may perform different levels of inquiry with the pen, and thus we need to evaluate whether pen gestures are simple enough for them to memorize, how much cognitive load will change as we increase the size of the gesture corpora, and in which contexts specified pen gestures should be disabled to keep the cognitive load at an acceptable level. In addition, the characteristics of the trajectory of handwriting may be able to provide insight about the level of cognitive load that a user is experiencing. The incorporation of pen gestures and handwriting inputs for cognitive load measurement is particularly relevant to the context of emergency services operators, who need to deal with many map applications and frequently write down notes about incidents as memory aids.
If a user’s level of experiencing cognitive load can be assessed in real time via pen interaction, an intelligent human-machine interaction system could potentially change its reactions based on user’s responses. This can lead to many real-life applications, e.g. in emergency services, distance learning, and future mobile phone applications.
This project aims to explore new methods to measurement cognitive load in non-intrusive way. Initial focus will be placed on experiment design and potential feature extraction. Later on in the project will also be researching the use of statistical algorithms or classification models to investigate the correlations between cognitive load and pen interaction features.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N8
Good programming skills required and good results in HCI course or AI/Data Mining course a plus. Some literature review will be required to learn the basics of pen gesture production. Signal processing and statistical analysis will also be required to extract features and investigate correlations between cognitive load and pen interaction behaviour.
NICTA Scholarship N9: Cognitive Load Measurement Based on EEG Signals
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Eric Choi (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Vera Chung (The University of Sydney)
Cognitive load is variously described as the level of perceived mental effort associated with thinking and reasoning in a human. Tasks performed under stressful conditions, or requiring complex hand/eye coordination can markedly increase cognitive load, and thus potentially interfere with other thought processes and consequently reduce overall task performance. If a user’s existing level of cognitive load can be assessed in real time, an intelligent system could potentially adapt its behaviours to implement strategies that reduce the cognitive load and correspondingly increase the task performance. While the concept of cognitive load itself may be more a theoretical construct, its measurement can lead to numerous real-world applications, e.g. in managing the cognitive load of traffic operators to enhance performance, in call centres for gathering customer emotional intelligence, and in electronic gaming for tailoring the plots according to a gamer’s cognitive and emotional states.
Although cognitive load is well understood as a theoretical construct, its measurement still mainly relies on methods that are either indirect (e.g. task performance), subjective, or both. There has been little research that looks at how cognitive load can be measured directly via electroencephalography (EEG). It is postulated that the direct measure of brain activities and their spatial patterns via EEG signal processing can provide a ground truth of the level of cognitive load. Various research problems to be addressed include low signal-to-noise ratio, robust multi-channel signal processing and robust modelling in the back-end pattern recognition. In addition, the design of experiments will be explored to validate the EEG algorithms in the context of decision support for incident management.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N9
The student should have knowledge in signal processing and pattern recognition. Good programming skills in Java/C/C++ and Matlab would be desirable. Objective evaluation of the various algorithms/methods will be required.
NICTA Scholarship N10: Automating analysis of Manual Gesture for Cognitive Load Detection
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Natalie Ruiz (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Vera Chung (The University of Sydney)
Cognitive load measurement is gaining increasing importance in the design and evaluation of all human/computer related products and processes, both traditional and technology based. Although it is well understood as a theoretical construct, the measurement of cognitive load mainly relies on methods that are either indirect, subjective, or both. Integrating aspects of cognitive load measurement, and how to detect users’ cognitive load levels by using non-intrusive methods under their real working environment are very interesting problems to solve, and can often be critical issues.
So far the bulk of the work related to cognitive load measurement has been centred on speech signal processing based methods. This is because speech can be collected and processed in real-time, in a non-intrusive way. This project aims to examine the patterns of manual gesture during both interaction and conversation, to complement speech based measures of load. Specifically, we would like to explore whether general gesture features such as gesture type, amplitude or frequency can tell us anything about whether a person is cognitively loaded or not.
It is expected that the successful applicant will analyse gesture datasets from a variety of contexts (netball testing, map-based interaction, and others) using various in-house developed tools and techniques (e.g. skin colour detection, hand tracking); or even develop their own tools as needed.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N10
Excellent video or image processing skills, programming skills in java or C, interest in HCI or cognitive science, good communication skills, and an inquisitive and enthusiastic attitude.
NICTA Scholarship N11: Galvanic Skin Response and Cognitive Load: Exploring things that make us break out in a sweat
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Natalie Ruiz (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Vera Chung (The University of Sydney)
Cognitive load measurement is gaining increasing importance in the design and evaluation of all human/computer related products and processes, both traditional and technology based. Although it is well understood as a theoretical construct, the measurement of cognitive load mainly relies on methods that are either indirect, subjective, or both. Integrating aspects of cognitive load measurement, and how to detect users’ cognitive load levels by using non-intrusive methods under their real working environment are very interesting problems to solve, and can often be critical issues.
So far the bulk of the work related to cognitive load measurement has been centered on speech signal processing based methods. This is because speech can be collected and processed in real-time, in a non-intrusive way. This project aims to examine the sensitivity of galvanic skin response to different levels of cognitive load. Galvanic skin response measures the conductance of your skin, or the way sweat glands are activated when people expend mental effort on puzzles or other complex tasks.
It is expected that the successful applicant will collect and analyse GSR datasets, designing suitable tasks, collecting GSR readings under no load and various levels of high load, and use various commercial (Thought Technology) or in-house developed tools and techniques (or even develop their own tools as needed) to test the sensitivity of GSR to people under varying load levels. Alternatively, previously collected datasets may be provided to the student for analysis.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N11
Excellent signal processing skills, programming skills in java or C, interest in HCI or cognitive science, good communication skills, and an inquisitive and enthusiastic attitude.
NICTA Scholarship N12: Harder than the eye can see – Eye-gaze patterns under High Cognitive Load
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Natalie Ruiz (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Vera Chung (The University of Sydney)
Cognitive load measurement is gaining increasing importance in the design and evaluation of all human/computer related products and processes, both traditional and technology based. Although it is well understood as a theoretical construct, the measurement of cognitive load mainly relies on methods that are either indirect, subjective, or both. Integrating aspects of cognitive load measurement, and how to detect users’ cognitive load levels by using non-intrusive methods under their real working environment are very interesting problems to solve, and can often be critical issues.
So far the bulk of the work related to cognitive load measurement has been centered on speech signal processing based methods. This is because speech can be collected and processed in real-time, in a non-intrusive way. This project aims to examine semantic eye-gaze patterns (what people look at, when and why) under different levels of cognitive load in a video-based cognition task.
It is expected that the successful applicant will analyse eye-gaze data using in-house developed tools and techniques (or even develop their own tools as needed) to extract visual search patterns related to high cognitive load. In parallel, machine learning algorithms could be applied to the dataset to identify differences between different load levels.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N12
Excellent video processing skills, programming skills in java or C, interest in HCI or cognitive science, good communication skills, and an inquisitive and enthusiastic attitude.
NICTA Scholarship N13: Detecting basic events from trajectories of soccer players
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Thomas Wolle (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Joachim Gudmundsson (NICTA)
Technological advances of location-aware devices, surveillance systems and electronic transaction networks lead to more and more opportunities to trace moving individuals. Consequently, an eclectic set of disciplines including geography, sports, database research, animal behaviour research, surveillance, security and transport analysis shows an increasing interest in movement patterns of entities in various spaces over various time scales.
A recent application area is the analysis of team sports, where players’ positions on the field are tracked with very high accuracy. Currently the trajectories are obtained automatically from 6-8 cameras around the field but all the annotation and analysis is performed manually. In this project the aim is to develop algorithms and software to automatically detect the most basic concepts in a soccer game, such as passes, possession, turnovers and so on. We will primarily use tools from the fields of algorithms, computational geometry and data mining. The project requires a mix of theory and programming.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N13
This is a new and exciting area where the group at NICTA is one of the world leaders. Research is done in close collaboration with all the researchers, and students are expected to contribute to the positive atmosphere in the group. Students are assumed to have basic knowledge in algorithms and data structures and a strong interest in problem solving.
NICTA Scholarship N14: Detect frequent ball movements
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Joachim Gudmundsson (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Thomas Wolle (NICTA)
Technological advances of location-aware devices, surveillance systems and electronic transaction networks lead to more and more opportunities to trace moving individuals. Consequently, an eclectic set of disciplines including geography, sports, database research, animal behaviour research, surveillance, security and transport analysis shows an increasing interest in movement patterns of entities in various spaces over various time scales.
A recent application area is the analysis of team sports, where players’ positions on the field are tracked with very high accuracy. Currently the trajectories are obtained automatically from 6-8 cameras around the field but all the annotation and analysis is performed manually. In this project the aim is to develop algorithms and software to automatically detect the most common ways the ball is transported from defence to an attacking player, either by detecting common sequences of players when an attack is built up or detecting frequent patterns of the balls trajectory (subtrajectory clustering). We will primarily use tools from the fields of algorithms, computational geometry and data mining. The project requires a mix of theory and programming.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N14
This is a new and exciting area where the group at NICTA is one of the world leaders. Research is done in close collaboration with all the researchers, and students are expected to contribute to the positive and international atmosphere in the group. Students are assumed to have basic knowledge in algorithms and data structures and a strong interest in problem solving.
NICTA Scholarship N15: Extract player statistics from trajectories of soccer players
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Joachim Gudmundsson (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Thomas Wolle (NICTA)
Technological advances of location-aware devices, surveillance systems and electronic transaction networks lead to more and more opportunities to trace moving individuals. Consequently, an eclectic set of disciplines including geography, sports, database research, animal behaviour research, surveillance, security and transport analysis shows an increasing interest in movement patterns of entities in various spaces over various time scales.
A recent application area is the analysis of team sports, where players’ positions on the field are tracked with very high accuracy. Currently the trajectories are obtained automatically from 6-8 cameras around the field but all the annotation and analysis is performed manually. In this project the aim is to extract as much player’s statistics as possible from the trajectory data. Existing statistics includes distance run and number of possessions, but there are many more that are of interest to a player, scout or coach, for example, frequent area of movement, number of interceptions and number of attacking passes. The project has a strong mix of theory and programming.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N15
This is a new and exciting area where the group at NICTA is one of the world leaders. Research is done in close collaboration with all the researchers, and students are expected to contribute to the positive and international atmosphere in the group. Students are assumed to have basic knowledge in algorithms and data structures and a strong interest in problem solving.
NICTA Scholarship N16: Develop a GUI for soccer analysis software tools
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Thomas Wolle (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Joachim Gudmundsson (NICTA)
Technological advances of location-aware devices, surveillance systems and electronic transaction networks lead to more and more opportunities to trace moving individuals. Consequently, an eclectic set of disciplines including geography, sports, database research, animal behaviour research, surveillance, security and transport analysis shows an increasing interest in movement patterns of entities in various spaces over various time scales.
One of the recent application areas is team sports, where players’ positions on the field are tracked with very high accuracy. Currently the trajectories are obtained automatically from 8 cameras around the field but all the annotation and analysis is performed manually. In this project the aim is to design and implement a GUI for coaches and players that visualizes video from the soccer game, the movement of players and the ball and, highlights patterns and events that have been discovered during the analysis of the game.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N16
This is a new and exciting area where the group at NICTA is one of the world leaders. Research is done in close collaboration with all the researchers, and students are expected to contribute to the positive and international atmosphere in the group. Students are assumed to have a strong interest in problem solving, and the design and implementation of a GUI.
NICTA Scholarship N17: Multimedia Information Retrieval using new data mining techniques
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Vera Chung (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Eric Choi (NICTA)
With the rapid increasing use of multimedia data such as audio, image and video, there is a strong demand for efficient techniques for their storage, browsing, indexing, and retrieval to exploit the full benefit of the explosive growth and application of multimedia data. This project will study and design some new data mining techniques for the application of digital museum, entertainment, internet shopping, and medical image retrieval system.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N17
Java, C/C++ programming
NICTA Scholarship N18: Implementation of a cooperative MAC protocol on the NICTA wireless testbed platform
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Lavy Libman, (The University of Sydney/NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Thierry Rakotoarivelo (NICTA)
In cooperative wireless communication, a node that overhears a failed packet transmission between its neighbours may take part in assisting the packet reach its destination, either by relaying/retransmitting the entire packet or providing additional error-correcting code bits that enable the intended receiver decode the information correctly. In this project, a simple cooperative extension of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol will be implemented on the NICTA wireless testbed. The student undertaking the project will become familiar with the NICTA ORBIT platform architecture and develop an extension of a Linux Wi-Fi device driver to enable the necessary functionality.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N18
The applicant must be skilled in systems-level programming and at least be familiar with the overall architecture of the Linux kernel and device drivers (ideally, have some experience in programming at the Linux kernel and device driver level). In addition, the applicant must be familiar with the IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) wireless LAN standard, at least from a user perspective.
NICTA Scholarship N19: Testing communication protocols in a real sensor network deployment
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Athanassios Boulis (NICTA)
The Roads and Transport Authority of NSW (RTA) together with NICTA are creating a sensor network testbed to monitor the structural health of bridges. The testbed will be functional by October 2009 and interesting research questions will need to get answered. One is the type of MAC used in the system. You will look at a few possibilities guided by your supervisor and you will have to implement them in the testbed using designs from other implementations or simulations. A detailed evaluation of the different possibilities will follow. Upon completion of this work a publication to a prestigious conference is very likely since these kinds of in-field studies are rare. You will be closely supervised and supported by your academic supervisor and have the opportunity to work along with other junior researchers.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N19
Excellent programming skills (C/C++, script languages); familiarity with Unix/Linux development environment; strong analytical skills; experience with wireless protocols and embedded programming desirable
NICTA Scholarship N20: Analyzing data from Energy Australia’s WiMAX deployment
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Athanassios Boulis (NICTA)
Energy Australia has deployed a testbed of 5 WiMAX basestations in Newcastle as part of their smart grid initiative and they already have 20,000 measurements around the area. They need to better understand the deployment and answer question like "what is the expected coverage if we move to other cities?" "how can I change my deployment to achieve better results with comparable cost?". You will first process the data in various ways so you can cluster them and provide meta-information not currently available such as 1) basestation association, 2) traffic conditions 3)terrain type. You will then analyze the richer data based on some techniques proposed by your supervisor and be able to infer high level trends. You will be closely supervised and supported by your academic supervisor and have the opportunity to work along with other junior researchers.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N20
Excellent programming skills (C/C++, python); familiarity with Unix/Linux development environments; Strong analytical skills
NICTA Scholarship N21: Enhancing models of a Wireless Sensor Network Simulator
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Athanassios Boulis (NICTA)
Castalia is an open source wireless sensor network simulator developed by NICTA with an active worldwide academic community. You will enhance some of Castalia's existing models based on measurements taken at NICTA. This work will give you great insight into large open-source software packages and the basics of wireless communication. You will be closely supervised and supported by your academic supervisor and have the opportunity to work along with other junior researchers.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N21
Excellent programming skills (C/C++, script languages); familiarity with Unix/Linux development environments; Strong analytical skills
NICTA Scholarship N22: Development of a Remote Collaboration Infrastructure and Its Services
Primary Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Masahiro Takatsuka (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Fang Cheng (NICTA)
Remote collaboration is one of the growing research in the field of computer supported co-operative work (CSCW). It involves technology such as video conferencing, remote screen sharing and multi-user interface. This project aims to develop a collaboration infrastructure supporting a wide range of the aforementioned technology and bringing them into a multi-party remote collaboration. It will involve development of the core infrastructure or services that sits on top of the infrastructure.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N22
This project requires good Java/C/C++ programming skills and knowledge on network communication protocols. A student will be required to implement various collaboration services using the Advanced Remote Collaboration Grid protocols.
NICTA Scholarship N23: Collaborative Haptic System
Primary Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Masahiro Takatsuka (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Fang Cheng (NICTA)
Images, sound and files are items commonly shared in the collaborative environment systems. While they are very effective media to share pieces of information, there are other types of information, which speaks to other sensory systems such as tactile sensors. Haptic devices, such as Phantom Omni, provide very realistic haptic feedback for interacting with information especially in 3D graphics environment. This project aim to develop a framework to link multiple haptic devices over the network as well as through game console (like xbox360) so that it enable remotely connected users to share tactile experience.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N23
This project requires good C/C++ programming skills and 3D computer graphics knowledge (especially OpenGL). A student will be required to implement software module, which links a haptic device (Phantom Omni) to XBox360, as well as linking multiple haptic devices over the network.
NICTA Scholarship N24: 3D Computer Graphics Compression
Primary Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Masahiro Takatsuka (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Fang Cheng (NICTA)
Widespread adoption of 3D graphics has driven the need for geometry compression. By reducing the size of the data, a performance gain in both bandwidth and processing can be achieved. This project aims to apply geometry compression algorithms for optimization in realtime remote rendering scenarios. After the re-engineering of the algorithms, their network performance will be evaluated. Based on the evaluation, new algorithms will be designed using the constraints present in 3D data and environment.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N24
This project requires good C/C++ programming skills and knowledge data structure/algorithms. Knowledge in 3D computer graphics will also be useful.
A student will be required to implement various compression algorithms and carry out performance tests using 3D graphics data.
NICTA Scholarship N25: Investigate the causes of poor performance of ETX estimation method using broadcast probing in presence of interfering traffic
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Zainab Zaidi (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt (The University of Sydney)
ETX (Expected Transmission Count) is a link quality indicator and shows the expected number of transmission attempts over a link in order to achieve successful delivery of the packet. A bad link would require many more attempts than a good link. ETX is measured through probing links, typically using broadcast probes. It has been shown in experiments that the change in ETX value, when probing is done without and in the presence of a competing data flow, cab be almost 10,000%. Such a change indicates that routing protocols, based on ETX, might be playing with random numbers and there are no significant benefits of considering link quality.
Unicast probes are more resilient than broadcast probes due to link-layer re-transmissions. However, re-transmissions only over-inflate the delivery probability of a unicast probe without actually reflecting the link quality. Theoretically, an accurate and cost-effective way could be sending more broadcast probes in the update cycle. If the presence of link-layer re-transmissions is the only strength of unicast over broadcast probing, increasing the number of broadcast probes should resolve the issue. More broadcast probes would still be more cost-effective than unicast probes.
Observing number of MAC re-transmissions is possibly the most accurate estimation method for ETX but it can only be done if links are being used for data delivery. Unicast probes can be sent over idle links and the respective MAC re-transmissions can be recorded but then it would be a costly method comparing with broadcast probing.
This project involves implementation of a probing mechanism, using broadcast and unicast probes, on our wireless multihop testbed and performing experiments to quantify the affects of data on the ETX metric of links in the radio space. We would compare the ETX metric values, using both probing methods, with actual data loss on the links to show how accurately (or inaccurately) ETX represents link quality. Further, we investigate the potential causes of any discrepancy and propose mitigation methods.
Reference:
Das, S. M., Pucha, H., Papagiannaki, K., and Hu, Y. C. 2007. Studying wireless routing link metric dynamics. Proceedings of the 7th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on internet Measurement (San Diego, California, USA, October 24 - 26, 2007). IMC '07. ACM, New York, NY, 327-332.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N25
Programming skills in C/C++ is required
NICTA Scholarship N26: Investigating and fixing anomalous behaviour of ETX estimation method
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Zainab Zaidi (NICTA)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt (The University of Sydney)
ETX (Expected Transmission Count) is a link quality indicator and shows the expected number of transmission attempts over a link in order to achieve successful delivery of the packet. A bad link would require many more attempts than a good link. ETX is measured through probing the links, typically using broadcast probes. It has been shown through experiments that ETX yields lower throughput than other metrics, such as, hop-count under certain operating conditions.
Simulation results show that the anomalous performance is due to the additional buffer overflow loss caused by the probe packets under saturation conditions. It is also shown in simulations that increasing send buffer length can resolve the issue to an extent. It is however, important to confirm the findings through a testbed implementation as simulation results can be dependent on a particular simulation platform. We also intend to look for possible solutions to mitigate the problem with ETX.
This project involves implementation of a probing mechanism on our wireless multihop testbed, performing experiments to confirm the simulation results, and developing the solution to mitigate the anomalous behaviour of the ETX estimation method.
Reference:
Z. Zaidi, T. Y. Tan, & Y. Cheng. “ETX could result in lower throughput”, Accepted for publication in IEEE ICCCN 2009. August 2009.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N26
Programming skills in C/C++ is required.
NICTA Scholarship N27: MATLAB/Octave on Cell and GPGUs
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Bernhard Scholz (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Thomas Wolle (NICTA)
Matrix languages including MATLAB and Octave are established standards for applications in science and engineering. They provide interactive programming environments that are easy-to-use due to their scripting-style programming languages with matrix data types. Current implementations of matrix languages do not utilize high-performance special-purpose chip architectures such as the IBM PowerXCell processor (Cell), which is currently used in the fastest computer in the world and in Sony's Playstation 3.
The aim of this project is to extend Octave (which is a open source version of MATLAB) to run on commodity graphics processing units (GPUs) and on the Cell Broadband Engine processor. With the increasing programmability of commodity GPUs (and Cell), these chips utilize a wide range of scientific applications and are capable of performing up to two tera floating point operation per second (per graphics card). Similarly, the Cell is one of the most advanced commodity streaming processing architectures.
Requirements for NICTA Scholarship N27
This project requires good programming skills in C++ and some algorithmic knowledge (in scheduling preferred).
SIT Scholarship S1: Intelligent Information Extraction from Clinical Notes
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
The use of clinical notes at the bedside is an important aspect of patient care in an Intensive Care Unit as there are many staff caring for different aspects of a patient's health. This means that staff have to read large amounts of notes to understand the current state of the patient's care. It would be significant advantage to staff if they could ask questions of the system and get high accuracy replies. The aim of this project is to produce a system that is very reliable at extracting information from the clinical notes.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S2: Text and Data Mining of Anatomical Pathology Database
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: South West Area Pathology Services
A large data warehouse of anatomical pathology records is available for text and data mining. There are many questions that need to be answered about the distribution of diseases in the community. However the accuracy of analyses is limited by the uncertainties in the ways pathologists write their reports. The aim of the project is to study the variation in the way reports are written and so improve the correct identification of records relevant of a particular study.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S3: Text Mining of Emergency Department Data Warehouse
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: Concord Hospital
An Emergency Department (ED) is a very busy location in a hospital and the efficiency of being able to search the clinical notes of a patient is vitally important in attending to a patient. The aim of this project is build an information retrieval engine that can accurately extract desired information from a database of ED clinical notes.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S4: Trauma Information System
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
The use of a clinical information System in a hospital is vital to recording the progress of a patient during their care. But, subsequently the contents of the system are important for studying the nature of care and disease across a cohort of patients. Our Laboratory is building a new type of clinical information system for the care of traumatised patients. The purpose of this project is to expand the current system components in response to testing being done at the hospital.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S5: Multi-Disciplinary Clinical Information System
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: Blacktown-Mt Druitt Hospital
The use of information systems in general wards of hospitals in in its earliest stages of development and very experimental. In these wards patients are served by many different clinical and community professionals preparing them for leaving the hospital and setting them up for care at home or in other more long term accommodation. The aim of this project is to use a new technology developed in our Laboratory to create a clinical information for this purpose.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S6: Enhancing the Functionality of a Clinical Data Analytics Language (CliniDAL)
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: Health Information Technology Research Laboratory
In the modern hospital ward the doctors need to be able to ask any ad hoc question of the clinical information system. A Clinical Data Analytics Language (CliniDAL) is a language that is portable to any variety of clinical information system as an enhancement. It has been installed on four different clinical information systems, three ICU and one anatomical pathology system. Two implementations, one anatomical pathology and one ICU, have been assessed on three research questions each in some detail with comparisons to retrievals using SQL. The results showed time efficiencies of up to 100-fold in extracting answers. The limitation of the existing system is that it has a very clumsy user interface without an intuitive design that makes it easy to use. We wish to do a usability study of the system and create a much improved user interface.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S7: Entity Recognition in Clinical Notes
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor Jon Patrick (The University of Sydney)
Sponsor: Health Information Technology Research Laboratory
The analysis of clinical notes requires a high accuracy identification of the medical entities in the text. This task is difficult for many words are used to talk about different types of entities. It is necessary to build a machine learning model of the task for recognising entities to get the highest level of accuracy for this task. The aim of this project is to experiment with different strategies for improving the accuracy of the entity recogniser.
Subject to funding.
SIT Scholarship S8: Visualisation and Analysis of Large and Complex Networks Using GEOMI
Primary Supervisor/s: Associate Professor Seok-Hee Hong (The University of Sydney)
Technological advances have increased data volumes in the last few years, and now we are experiencing a “data deluge” in which data is produced much faster than it can be used by humans.
Visualization can be an effective analysis tool for such data, which reveals the hidden structure of the data and amplifies human understanding, thus leading to new insights and findings.
Recently, we prototyped GEOMI, a visual analytic tool for large and complex networks. GEOMI is a federated system which includes 3D rendering.
This project aims to fully develop and engineer GEOMI-2 for biologists and sociologists to support various "analytical tasks" such as knowledge discovery, pattern mining, critical insights and prediction.
SIT Scholarship S9: Binding Database-driven Multimedia Medical Data to a Web-based Personal Health Record
Primary Supervisor/s: Professor David Dagan Feng (The University of Sydney)
Collaborating/Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Jinman Kim and Mr Liviu Constantinescu (The University of Sydney), Dr Peng Gong and Dr Lingfeng Wen (Royal Prince Alfred Hospital)
Sponsor: Biomedical and Multimedia Information Technology Research Group
Web-based personal health records provide patients an unprecedented level of user control over and access to their medical information, empowering individuals to take charge of their own personal wellbeing, and fueling innovation in telemedicine and mobile health.
Such records currently support a wide variety of medical datatypes, but make little allowance for multimedia data of the sort that is vital to the diagnosis, staging and treatment of a number of serious diseases.
The aim of this project is to take advantage of network technologies developed in-house and a rich media content management system built in conjunction with the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, integrating some of the capabilities of these technologies into a web-based personal health record.
The final system will be designed to withstand changes to the hospital data infrastructure. Students will have the opportunity to work closely with both medical and academic staff members, and to potentially deploy their system for live user trials.
Requirements for SIT Scholarship S9
Basic knowledge of web-platform development and some familiarity with database management systems. Candidates should have some experience with CGI scripting. Familiarity with medical image standards (e.g. DICOM) and intra-application networking via middleware protocols (e.g. Zend) is helpful but not necessary.
Value: $5,500
SIT Scholarship S10: Data Mining of Interactions (Application in TCM Prescription)
Primary Supervisor/s: Dr Simon Poon (The University of Sydney)
Associate Supervisor/s: Dr Josiah Poon (The University of Sydney)
Understanding complex interactions amongst multiple study factors is central for a range of academic disciplines. Changing one factor may have little effect on study outcome if other factors remain unchanged. Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a good example. It is conceptually different from Western medicine. Instead of having drugs that are independent and non-interfering as in the Western world, the prescription in TCM is a collection of herbs with the desired healing effect coming from the combination and interaction of the herbs. In fact, TCM has some peculiars that an herb can be toxic if used alone, but it is because of the inclusion of another herb that is able to neutralize the toxicity. There are simply many interesting hidden interacting phenomenon in TCM.
The aim of this project is to develop an appropriate research strategy to understand relationships among interacting factors and to derive a suitable analytical model to assess the strength of interactions on study outcome. The application can be used to determine how the level of effect is changed under the certain conditions (or contingent) of other studies factors, i.e. to facilitate a good understanding of the diverse interactions and interrelatedness among the herbs and how they impact on certain diseases.
The project will include the development/implementation of a data mining algorithm as well as to discover interaction patterns from given TCM datasets.
Requirements for SIT Scholarship S10
Statistics/machine learning/data mining, Java, R