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
 APPLY FOR RESEARCH
o Thesis topics
La Trobe University > Department of Computer Science and Information
Technology > Research > Apply for research > Thesis topics

Thesis topics
Honours/Masters by Coursework Thesis
Coordinator
Dr. Eric Pardede
Beth Gleeson 221
Melbourne (Bundoora) Campus
T: 03 9479 3459
E: E.Pardede@latrobe.edu.au

Below are the research areas of staff at both the Melbourne and
Bendigo Campuses for the Department of Computer Science and
Information Technology. Topics suitable for the Fourth Year Project
(CPA/CPB) will be negotiated between students and staff from the
Melbourne Campus.
 Students should discuss their topic of interest with the respective
staff member and get their approval before making a final decision.
In some cases, a student may choose a topic outside the list of
topics below provided a staff member is willing to act as supervisor
and the Head of Department judges it to be an appropriate thesis or
project topic. Students are advised to complete all the discussions
well before the start of the proposed enrolment, so that they are not
disadvantaged.

Minor research thesis (45cp, duration – two

semesters)
 CSE5TSA and CSE5TSB – semester 1  and semester 2
Please refer to online subject outline for CSE5TSA and CSE5TSB for
more details and requirements.

How to apply
All students enrolling in:

 a thesis must download and complete a Thesis Administration

Form [DOC 95KB]
 a project must download and complete a Major Computer
Engineering Project Administration Form [DOC 94KB].
The form must be signed by the staff member who is acting as
supervisor and submitted to Dr Eric Pardede.

You must have a copy of the signed Administration Form to get your
enrolment approved. Please refer to the Fourth Year Unit Guide for
important dates related to theses and projects.

Melbourne Campus
Please see our staff page for a list of academic staff located at the
Melbourne Campus.
Dr Jinli Cao

Professor Phoebe Chen

This project we try to focus on speech-based correlates of a variety

of medical situations using automatic, signal processing and
computational methods.  If such speech indications can be
recognized and quantified automatically, this information can be
used to carry diagnosis and treatment of medical circumstances in
clinical settings and to additional deep research in thoughtful
cognition.  This research will explore features extracted from the
audio signal and research that will present some applied research
that uses computational methods to develop assistive and adaptive
speech technologies.

Topic 4: Home-based Virtual Reality Systems to Support

Physical                                                Activity for Health and
Wellbeing
Recently, Nintendo Wii (hand held remote controllers and Wii fit
balance board) can support physical activity, movement, balance
and health at home. In this project, we would like to find out how
this technology can help older people at home on - What virtual
reality systems have been used for physical activity for people's
health and wellbeing? What is the helpfulness of virtual reality
systems on physical activity limitations?

Topic 5: Sophisticated Diagnostic Medical Imaging

Imaging technologies such as Magnetic Resonance Imaging and
Ultrasonography are allowing researchers the opportunity to
investigate image structures.  This will give us the chance to
diagnostic disease and health thought image analysis. More details
please discuss it with Phoebe.

Dr Scott Mann
Research Areas of Interest
 Bioinformatics Techniques
 Genetic and Medical Data Warehousing
 Learning Technologies
 Visualisation of Scientific Data
 Human-Machine Interfacing
Topic 1: DNA Packing Prediction in Prokaryotes

Prokaryotes, single-celled organisms like bacteria, do not have an

enclosed nucleus, therefore their DNA is floating around in the
cytoplasm. This project will use computational techniques to analyse
DNA sequences to assess supercoiling in the context of packing
large amounts of DNA and its implications for 3D
structures.  Machine learning, profile generation and statistical
techniques are combined to generate a suite of predictive tools for
the Bioinformatic community.

Topic 2: Visualisation of Comparative Genomics Data

The comparative genomics approach compares two or more
genomes (the total heritable portion of an organism). Traditional
visual presentations have centered on linear tracks with connecting
lines to show points of similarity or difference. In this project you
will overlay large amounts of comparative data on a set of 3D
surfaces which are controlled and interfaced by using human
interaction, like the Xbox Kinect.

Topic 3: Real-time Concept Feedback in Lectures

This project requires you to develop a web application that will be
used by students and teachers to help determine how concepts are
being understood by the class. The intention is students will come to
a lecture, open the class handout in digital form on their
iPads/tablets/laptops and follow along with the lecturer. On the
presenters screen, the lecturer will have a panel showing how the
class is understanding the content they are teaching. Significant
literature analysis of existing techniques in this research area would
be a feature of the project.
 Dr Naveen Chilamkurti

Research Areas of Interest:

 Protocol & Network Engineering
 Bio-inspired communications
 Layered Multimedia Multicast protocols
 Multimedia Systems
 Wireless Multimedia Networks
 Wireless Sensor Networks
 Cross-layer Architecture for Wireless Networks
 Vehicular communications
 Next Generation Wireless Systems (WiMAX)

Topic 1: A cross-layer Architecture for improvement of H.264

video transmission over Wireless LAN Networks.
Recently, in an effort to improve the performance of wireless
networks, there has been increased interest in protocols that rely on
interactions between different layers of OSI layer
architecture.  Recently, the H.264/AVC video coding standard,
proposed by JVT and ITU-T achieved a significant improvement in
compression efficiency over existing standards.  This project will
focus on the transmission issues of H.264 over WLAN (Wireless
LAN) using QOS cross-layer architecture.  The cross-layer
architecture can be interactions between Application layer and MAC
layer primitives.  Based on the QOS requirements of different data
partitions in H.264, a marking scheme can be designed at the MAC
layer to improve the performance of video quality using H.264 video
codec.

Topic 2: Performance and analysis of Wireless Multimedia

Sensor Networks (WMSN)
Recent advances in hardware techniques have fostered the
development of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks
(WMSN).  These networks are interconnected with devices such as
video, voice and still images and are connected to a remote site for
data and video analysis.  The processing and quality of video and
audio will be a challenging factor, especially with low powered
sensor nodes.  Existing solutions, frameworks, and design
implementations using test beds and simulations will be
investigated.  The more open issues and open research issues at the
application, transport, network, link, and physical layers of the
communication protocol stack are also investigated.

Topic 3:           Adaptive FEC algorithms for Wireless LAN

Networks
In this Project, we used an adaptive FEC algorithm for wireless
networks which is an extension of the traditional FEC schemes.  The
algorithm uses the advantages of traditional FEC schemes, which
normally fixes the errors occurring within the information packages
before they occur.  Using simulation experiments, our work has
shown that the adaptive FEC algorithm improves the performance of
the system by dynamically tuning FEC strength to the current
amount of wireless channel loss.

Topic 4: Vehicular communications

The development of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) brings the
promise of improved load safety and comfortable/infotainment
driving environments. Recent advances of wireless vehicular
communications supporting Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-
To-Infrastructure (V21) communications have become a
cornerstone of ITS.  Wireless vehicular communications for ITS is
one of the most interesting and active research topics, which is
requiring vital efforts from both the industry and the academic.  In
particular, studies on network routing and communication algorithm
for V2V and V2I have posed various challenges. Most of current
works on V2V and V2I communications mainly focuses on non-IP
data communications.  These challenges require developing new
network routing protocols and design communication algorithms,
especially for IP data communications.

Dr Somnath Ghosh
Topic 1: Implementation of a MAC layer Protocol for
Synchronised Global  Sleep Schedule for Wireless Sensor
Networks
Wireless Sensor Networks

The rapid advances in the recent years in the areas of integrated

circuit electronics, wireless communication and micro-
electromechanical systems have led to the emergence of the
wireless sensor network technology. The 'Smart Dust' project at the
University of California, Berkley, introduced the vision of self-
configuring networks of inexpensive small (~1 mm3 ) nodes (with a
processor, a radio transceiver and sensors) in a wide range of
applications such as environment monitoring, health care and
agriculture.

Though the application domain, extant and envisaged, of wireless

sensor networks (WSNs) is wide, there are a few common
characteristics:

WSNs are almost always single application systems. The nodes in a

WSN co-operate towards the goal of the application; the nodes do
not compete for resources. The protocols used in a WSN, therefore,
are designed with objectives which differ from the objectives of the
protocols in other computer networks.

WSNs are usually randomly deployed (scattered/aerially dropped)

and are self-configuring. The nodes discover their neighbours and
build the topology distributed algorithms using local knowledge.

WSN nodes resource constrained. In order to keep the size and the
cost of the nodes down, the nodes have limited processing power,
memory and radio range. However, the resource constraint which
has the most significant impact on many WSNs is the constraint on
energy. WSN nodes are battery operated. Many wireless sensor
networks are deployed in locations where battery replacement is not
feasible. A node has to be discarded when the battery depletes.
Energy scavenging may alleviate this problem in some sensor
networks. Most WSN protocols are very conscious of the limited
supply of energy, and try to conserve energy.

Energy efficient Medium Access Control protocols

A medium access control protocol allows the nodes in a

neighbourhood (nodes within a radio range) to access the
communications medium without interfering with each other. This
may require monitoring communication in the neighbourhood, and
communicating with neighbours even when no data is to be
communicated. As stated earlier, in a WSN, energy expenditure
needs to be kept low while carrying out the activities required for
medium access control. A common strategy for energy conservation
in WSNs is to allow the nodes to turn off their radio systems
(entering a sleep mode) periodically, as the radio in a WSN node is
major energy consumer. However, when two neighbouring nodes
need to communicate, they both must be awake. One way to
achieve this, as proposed in [1,2] is for one of the two neighbours
to poll the other one to set up a rendezvous. Another mechanism is
to have all nodes in a neighbourhood to have a sychronised periodic
sleep patterns proposed in [3,4]. The sychronised sleep pattern
scheme proposed in [3] is used in the popular Mica and Telos motes
commercially produced by Crossbow. However, creating and
maintaining a single sleep schedule requires overcoming a number
of difficulties [5], including the problem of designing a distributed
algorithm for merging clusters of nodes following different sleep
schedules.

Proposed work

This project will involve implementation of a new MAC protocol with

synchronised sleep schedule on TELOS-B WSN nodes (in a C-like
language, NES-C, on the TinyOS platform), computing the
parameters (control packet transmission times, propagation delays
 etc.) for the implementation of the protocol, and then use these
parameters for simulating a large WSN system (using OPNET) to
evaluate the performance of the new MAC protocol.

References

1. E.Y.A. Lin, J.M. Rabaey and A. Wolisz. Power-

efficient  rendezvous schemes for dense wireless sensor networks.
2004 IEEE International Conference on Communications [2004].
2. c. Schurgers, V. Tsiatsis,  S.  Ganeriwal, and M. Srivastava.
Optimizing Sensor Networks in the Energy-Latency-Density Design
Space, IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MOBILE COMPUTING, Vol 1, pp 70-
80 [2004]
3. Wei Ye and Heidemann, J. and Estrin, D., Medium access
control with coordinated adaptive sleeping for wireless sensor
networks, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking. Vol 12, pp 493-
506 [2004]
4. Wei Ye and Fabio Silva, and John Heidemann, Ultra-Low Duty
Cycle MAC with Scheduled Channel Polling, Proceedings of the
Fourth ACM SenSys Conference [2006]
5. Ghosh, S. and Veeraraghavan P. and Singh S. and Zhang L.,
Performance of a Wireless Sensor Network MAC Protocol with a
Global Sleep Schedule, International Journal of Multimedia and
Ubiquitous Engineering, Vol. 4, pp. 99-113 [2009]

Assoc. Prof. Zhen He

Assoc. Prof. Zhen He will not be available this year to supervise any
honours/masters thesis topics.

Assoc. Prof. Richard Lai

Research Areas of Interest:
 Component Based Software Engineering
 Software Process and Management
 Software Measurement, Metrics and Testing
 Requirement Engineering and UML specification
The projects that I offer are suitable to students who have a keen
interest in software engineering and software project
management.  Those who get a good grade in Software Engineering
project, or SNM or SRT are encouraged to discuss the potential
projects with me.

Topic 1: Software Sizing: UML approach

Software size is important in the management of software
development because it is a generally reliable predictor of project
effort, duration, and cost.  According to the Software Engineering
Institute's (SEI)  Capability Maturity Model (CMM), size is
recommended as one of the most fundamental measurements
beginning as early as Level 2.  In the past two decades, counting
number of Source Line of Code (SLOC) and Function Points (FP)
have been dominating software sizing approaches.

Software size is a key input to all software cost estimation models.

For example, SLOC has been used as the primary size input in many
cost estimation tools such as COCOMO.  Unfortunately, there are
significant drawbacks in SLOC and FP sizing for software
estimation.  For example, SLOC can only be accurately counted
when the software construction is complete, while the most critical
software estimations need to be performed before
construction.  The FP can only be manually counted, and the
estimator has to have special expertise and experience to do so.
Furthermore, FP counting involves a degree of subjectivity.

Facing these challenges, researchers are looking for faster, cheaper,

and more effective methods to estimate software size.  This project
is to investigate the use of UML as a software sizing technique.

Topic 2: Software Process Improvement for Component-Based

Software Engineering
In the last few years, the software engineering community has
witnessed the growing popularity of Component-Based Development
(CBD), refocusing software development from core in-house
development to the use of internally or externally supplied
components. Component-Based Software Engineering (CBSE) as an
emerging discipline is targeted at improving the understanding of
components and of systems built from components and at
improving the CBD process itself.

The field of Software Process Improvement (SPI), and in particular

of assessment-based software process improvement, shares very
similar goals to CBSE – shorter time-to-market, reduced costs and
increased quality – and provides a wide spectrum of approaches to
the evaluation and improvement of software processes.  Although
this discipline has made considerable advances in the
standardization of these approaches (e.g. ISO 15504) as well as of
the underlying process models, it generally lacks tailoring and
customisation to CBSE, e.g. with respect to terminology or the
adequacy and granularity of the underlying process or assessment
models. This project is to investigate how SPI can be applied to
CBSE.

Topic 3: Requirement Engineering for Component-Based

Software System
Requirements Engineering (RE) consists of eliciting stakeholders
need, refining the acquired needs into non-conflicting requirement
statements and validating these requirements with
stakeholders.  New challenges for RE process are introduced by
CBSD as component selection is a key issue of it.  Components are
designed according to general requirements.  As such, the needs of
stakeholders should be continually negotiated and changed
according to the features offered by components.  In addition, CBSD
requirements need not be complete as initial incomplete
requirements can be progressively refined as suitable components
can be found.

The RE process of current CBSD is mainly driven by availability of

software components. It reduces the scope of requirement
negotiation; and makes it difficult to address quality attributes and
system level concerns.  In addition, components are selected on
 individual bases which make it difficult to evaluate how components
fit in with the overall system requirements. Therefore, it is
necessary that CBSD should be driven by stakeholder's
requirements.

CBSD requirements are collected as high level needs, and are then
modelled by identifying the importance of each need. Each need is
identified as mandatory, important, essential or optional.  This
project is to investigate into having a systematic process of refining
these requirements by specifying candidate components.

Dr Fei Liu
Research areas of interest:
 Artificial Intelligence (Sentiment Analysis, Automated
Reasoning and QA Systems)
 Web Semantics
Topic 1: Word Sense Disambiguation based Query Expansion
You may wonder when we type the question "What is the weather
today in Melbourne?" how does Google Search Engineer figure out
the meaning of your question and present you with an accurate
answer.  This is the research of Question-Answering Systems (QA
Systems).

A QA system converts a user's query into a sequence of key words,

conducts web search using the keywords, and identifies the most
proper text segment as the answer to the query.  A QA system
contains a number of components.  The first component is Query
Expansion.  The research project is to analyse the query being
entered by the user, to expand it by adding synonyms, to identify
the key words within the query, and finally to decide the precise
meaning of each key word. Word Sense Disambiguation techniques
will be applied to the research.

Topic 2: Connectives and Phrases based Sentiment Analysis

The World Wide Web contains a huge number of documents which
express opinions, containing comments, feedback, critiques, reviews
and blogs, etc.  These documents provide valuable information
which can help people with their decision making.  For example,
product reviews can help enterprises promote their products;
comments on a policy can help politicians clarify their political
strategy; event critiques can help the involved parties reflect on
their activities, etc.  However, the number of these types of
documents is huge, so it is impossible for humans to read and
analyse all of them.  Thus, automatically analyzing opinions
expressed on various web platforms is increasingly important for
effective decision making. The task of developing such a technique
is sentiment analysis or opinion mining.

In this project, we attempt to analyse the sentiment orientation of a

sample by identifying the connectives and phrases in its text.  As a
result, the keyword which expresses the sentiment orientation of
the author can be identified.  The method is to be compounded with
classical analysis methods (machine learning based or clustering
based) to achieve a higher accuracy.

Topic 3: Natural Language Independent Knowledge

Representation
The purpose of the research is to establish a new scheme in
knowledge representation – Natural Language Independent
Knowledge Representation.  The scheme aims to represent a datum
(a concept) by using its relation with other concepts, and therefore
the representation can be language independent/semi-
independent.  A concept can be implemented as a class in JAVA
programming language.  The class hierarchy can be established
through the inheritance relationship.  Attributes in the class define
the relations between concepts.

The scheme can be applied to Natural Language Processing,

Sentiment Analysis and Question-Answering Systems to serve as a
tool for identifying the precise meaning of a word, and consequently
to achieve Word Sense Disambiguation.
 Dr Kinh Nguyen
Topic 1: Managing Statistical Survey Data through Conceptual
Modeling
Surveys, or questionnaires, are a very common means to obtained
information in scientific and social investigations.

Typically, the data are entered into a number of data files (e.g. text
files or excel files), and then the data in the files are fed into some
statistical package for statistical analysis. As the work progressed,
to test some hypotheses, or to perform some exploratory analysis,
new data files often had to be prepared. This approach is very time-
consuming and error-prone.

This thesis proposes and investigates a new approach, in which

1. We build a model of the data contained in the survey. This

model captures all the information contained in the survey, where
each piece of information is modelled as a fact.
2. We then derive (from the fact model) a schema for a relational
database and store data in the database.
3. Then for any statistical analysis to be done, we simply extract
the required data, in its required tabular form, using standard SQL,
and feed them to the statistical package.
In fact, this project serves two related purposes: (1) To
systematically ensure that we can store all the relevant data and
maximize their use for statistical analysis, and (2) To construct an
ontology of the related field to improve the concepts and their
relationships in that field.

Topic 2: A Critical Study and Evaluation of the SBVR Standard

SBVR (Semantics Business Vocabulary and Rules) is the
comprehensive standard for defining the vocabulary and rules of
application domains. That is, the aim of SBVR is to capture and
represent all the business concepts (vocabulary) and all the
business rules. The importance of business rules is that they drive
the business activities and they govern the way the business
software system behaves. In other words, the concepts and rules
captured by SBVR represent the business knowledge required to
understand the business and to build software systems to support
the business.

So far, the adoption of the SBVR Standard for practical application

development has been slow. The aim of the thesis is to study the
SBVR standard in depth, to survey the works that have been
published since the release of the Standard, and to critically
evaluate the applicability of SBVR to practical information system
development.

Topic 3: Converting Business Rule Models to UML (Object-

Oriented) Models: An Application of Meta Modelling
Business rules are the most important factor that determines the structure and
behavior of an information system. A dominant standard, known as SBVR
(Semantic Business Vocabulary and Rules), has been developed to express
business rules.
The aim of the thesis is to automate the conversion of an SBVR
business rule models into an object-oriented UML business model.
This is a very important task for building business-rule-driven
information system. Typically, the process for building such a
system starts with building an SBVR model, and then translates that
model into a UML model, which is more suitable for practical
implementation.

The approach proposed for this thesis consists of the following

steps: (1) Build a formal model for SBVR; (2) Build a formal model
for UML; (3) Formulate transformation rules to transform a SBVR
model into a UML model; (4) Implement a system to automatically
translate an SBVR model into a UML model.

Topic 4: Design and Implementation of Web Services for

Information Systems
The aim of web services is to make data resources available over
the Internet to applications (programs) written in any language.
There are two approaches to web services: SOAP (where "SOAP"
stands for "Simple Object Access Protocol) -based and RESTful
(where "REST" stands for "Representational State Transfer).
RESTful Web services have now been recognized as generally the
most useful methods to provide data-services for web and mobile
application development.

The aim of the thesis is to study the concept of RESTful web

services in depth and to construct a catalogue of patterns for
designing data-intensive web services. The aim of the catalogue is
to act as a guide for practical design of web services for application
development.

Dr Eric Pardede
Topic 1: Using Case Based Recommended System for Subject
Selection
The rationale behind this research is a need for a practical system
that can be used by students to select subjects during their study.
While the advice of course coordinator and the short description of
the subject in the handbook are most frequently used by students
to make up their mind, they can make more informed decisions by
using experience of past students. In this thesis, the student will
use Case Based Reasoning (CBR) to design and develop a
recommender system for subject selection in higher education
context. The research component of this project is the identification
and validation of the CBR approach and its parameters for the
recommendation system.

NOTE: This topic can also be used for CSE4CPA/CPB

Topic 2: Detecting Improper Users' Behaviors in Online Social

Networks
Online Social Networks (OSNs) give benefits for daily life
activities.  They also bring with them various risks by facilitating
improper users' behaviors.  In this study, the student will select one
type of improper behaviors in OSNs (cyber-bullying, cyber-stalking,
hate campaign etc.), and using an available technique such as
sentiment analysis to avoid or counter attack the behavior.  The
outcome of this research is a strategy or a policy that can be
considered by OSNs providers.

Topic 3: Using Educational Technologies to facilitate

Constructive Alignment in Subject Design.
Constructive alignment (CA) is a subject design concept used in
higher education sector.  The idea is to identify three basic
components of a subject (Intended Learning Outcomes (ILO), Teach
Learning Activities (TLA), and Assessment Tasks (AT)) and to
integrate them into a cohesive alignment with student learning as
the ultimate goal.  In this thesis, the student will review educational
technology methods and tools that have been used in higher
education sector.  Based on the benchmarking activity, the student
will identify the most appropriate methods and tools that can
enhance CA for a particular subject design (most likely subject in
IT/Engineering course).

Topic 4: Mapping Relational Database (RDB) Schema to

NoSQL Database Schemas and Query Rewriting of SQL to
NoSQL Queries
With the increasing usage of NoSQL databases in many applications,
there is a tendency that existing data stored in RDB to be converted
into NoSQL structure.  Since there are several families of NoSQL
Database (key value, column, document, graph), the mapping of
RDB Schema to NoSQL Database schema is not straight
forward.  Different family of NoSQL database will treat constraints in
RDB differently.  The outcome of this thesis is to propose mapping
rules of RDB to NoSQL database schema.

In addition, once the mapping rules are established, the research

can also be extended by proposing the query rewriting of SQL in
RDB into NoSQL queries.
 Dr Mahardhika Pratama
General areas of interest:

 Neural and Fuzzy Systems

 Intelligent Control Systems
 Machine Learning
 Data Stream Mining
 Real-World Applications of Computational Intelligence.
Topic 1: Advanced Evolving Intelligent System
Data stream mining is today one of the most challenging research
topic, because we enter the data-rich era. This condition requires a
computationally light learning algorithm, which is scalable to
process large data streams. Furthermore, data streams are often
dynamic and do not follow a specific and predictable data
distribution. A flexible machine learning algorithm with a self-
organizing property is desired to overcome this situation, because it
can adapt itself to any variation of data streams. Evolving intelligent
system (EIS) is a recent initiative of the computational intelligent
society (CIS) for data stream mining tasks. It features an open
structure, where it can start either from scratch with an empty rule
base or initially trained rule base. Its fuzzy rules are then
automatically generated referring to contribution and novelty of
data stream. In this research project, you will work on extension of
existing EISs to enhance its online learning performance, thus
improving its predictive accuracy and speeding up its training
process. Research directions to be pursued in this project is to
address the issue of uncertainty in data streams.

Topic 2: Machine Learning Algorithm for Online Big Data

Analytics
The era of big data refers to a scale of dataset, which goes beyond
capabilities of existing database management tools to collect, store,
manage and analyze. Although the big data is often associated with
the issue of volume, researchers in the field have found that it is
inherent to other 4Vs: Variety, Velocity, Veracity, Velocity, etc.
Various data analytic tools have been proposed. The so-called
MapReduce from Google is among the most widely used approach.
Nevertheless, vast majority of existing works are offline in nature,
because it assumes full access of complete dataset and allows a
machine learning algorithm to perform multiple passes over all data.
In this project, you are supposed to develop an online parallelization
technique to be integrated with evolving intelligent system (EIS).
Moreover, you will develop a data fusion technique, which will
combine results of EIS from different data partitions.

Topic 3: Metacognitive Scaffolding Learning Machine

Existing machine learning algorithm is always cognitive in nature,
where they just consider the issue of how-to-learn. One may agree
the learning process of human being always is always meta-
cognitive in nature, because it involves two other issues: what-to-
learn, when-to-learn. Recently, the notion of the metacognitive
learning machine has been developed and exploits the theory of the
meta-memory from psychology. The concept of scaffolding theory, a
prominent tutoring theory for a student to learn a complex task, has
been implemented in the metacognitive learning machine as a
design principle of the how-to-learn part. This project will be
devoted to enhance our past works of the metacognitive scaffolding
learning machine. It will study some refinements of learning
modules to achieve better learning performances.

Topic 4: Advanced Evolving Intelligent System in a Complex

Manufacturing Industry
Undetected or premature tool failure may lead to costly scrap or
rework arising from impaired surface finishing, loss of dimensional
accuracy or possible damage to the work-piece or machine. The
issue requires the advancement of conventional TCMSs using online
adaptive learning techniques to predict tool wear on the fly. The
nonlinear and uncertain nature of machining processes presents
very complex issues to be resolved by both academia and industry,
because of the use of multi-point cutting tools at high speed,
varying machining parameters, and inconsistency and variability of
cutter geometry/dimensions. The cutting-edge learning
methodologies developed in this project will pioneer frontier tool-
condition monitoring technologies in manufacturing industries

Topic 5: Online Text Classification Using Advanced Evolving

Intelligent System
Today, we confront social media text data explosion. From these
massive data amounts, various data analytic tasks can be done
such as sentiment analysis, recommendation task, web news
mining, etc. Because social media data constitute text data, they
usually involve high dimensionality problem. For example, two
popular text classification problems, namely 20 Newsgroup and
Reuters21578 top-10 have more than 15,000 input features.
Furthermore, information in the social media platform is
continuously growing and rapidly changing, this definitely requires
highly scalable and adaptive data mining tools, which searches for
information much more than the existing ones used to do – evolving
intelligent system. The research outcome will be useful in the large-
scale applications, which go beyond capabilities of existing data
mining technologies. This project will not only cope with the
exponential growth of data streams in the social media, but also will
develop flexible machine learning solution, which adapts to the
time-varying nature of the social media data.

Professor Wenny Rahayu

Topic 1: Integrating Big Data from Heterogeneous Data
Sources and Building a Single Repository
NEW (This topic is supervised together with Dr. A.S.M.
Kayes)

Big data is too large, dynamic and complex to capture, analyse and
integrate by using the currently available computing tools and
techniques.  By definition, it can be characterized by five V's:
volume, velocity, variety, veracity and value.  Big data collection,
integration and storing are the main challenges of this project as
the integration and storing of big data requires special
care.  Consequently, it is necessary to prevent possible data loss in
between the collection and processing, as big data always comes
from a great verity of sources, including the high volume of
streaming data of dynamic environmental data (e.g., data from the
IoT devices or sensors), which by nature has the dynamically
changing characteristics.  As such, it opens new scientific
(research) directions for the development of new underlying
theories and software tools, including more advanced and
specialized analytic.

However, most of the big data technologies today (e.g., Hadoop)

lack sufficient techniques and tools to integrate big data from
heterogeneous sources, build a single repository, and ensure the
availability of correct and updated data at any time.  For example,
the volume of big data is too large to load into a desktop's
screen/memory, fit in standard database, and analyse/handle by
the traditional database/software tools.  In order to integrate big
data from various sources with different variety and velocity and
build a central repository accordingly, it is increasingly important to
develop a new scientific methodology, including new software tools
and techniques. In particular, the main focus of this project is
to capture, analyse and integrate big data from different
sources, including dynamic streaming data and static data
from database.

Towards this end, Government data can be used to analyse and

develop applications and tools which can ensure benefit to the
society.  For example, data.gov.au provides public access to
government big data, including open datasets.

Topic 2: Developing a Secure Electronic Health Service

(Possible a Mobile Health Service) to Exchange HER (Private
and Sensitive Data)
NEW (This topic is supervised together with Dr. A.S.M. Kayes)
In recent years, electronic health services are increasingly used by
patients, healthcare providers, healthcare professionals, etc. (e.g.,
hospital doctors, nurses, researchers) with the growth of the
dynamic ICT environments.  Healthcare consumers and providers
have been using a verity of such services via different technologies
such as desktop, mobile technology, cell phone, smartphone, tablet,
etc.  For example, eHealth service is used in Australia to store and
transmit the health information of the users in one secure and
trusted environment.

However, security is still a big challenge and central research issue

in the delivery of electronic health services. In particular, it is
essential to have the security mechanisms and policies for the
exchange of electronic health records (EHR) between patients and
healthcare providers/professionals.  For example, in an
emergency situation (i.e., when a patient's health condition
is critical), how can an electronic health service allow the
responsible healthcare professionals to access a patient's
necessary EHR (e.g., health history, private health
information)?  Moreover, healthcare professionals with different
access rights should also be monitored for a further security
measure without affecting the healthcare workflow.

In addition to security issue, privacy is also a concern that should

neo be compromised, especially when there is a need to ensure
security.  For example, how can a patient be sure that his
privacy will be protected by healthcare
providers/professionals?   How can an electronic health
service ensures selective sharing of health information
which can be derived from the EHR and approved by relevant
patients/healthcare professionals.

Topic 3: Building a Collaborative Online Decision Support

Systems (DSS)
The main aim of this project is to enable online right-time data
analysis and statistical functions to generate the different reports
that are required for collaborative decision making.  In a
collaborative system, the different users/ organisations that form
the collaboration will be able to make on the fly decisions based on
the most up-to-date reporting (e.g. in cases such as natural
disasters bush fires, tsunami, etc.).
This collaborative DSS will be built on an underlying integrated data
repository which captures the different data sources relevant to the
different organisations in the collaborative environment.  Within the
DSS, some measurements relevant to individual organisation (e.g. a
certain KPI -Key Performance Indicators)  may be embedded in
addition to organisation performance information.  The qualitative
measures specify within the KPI  will be mapped to numeric
rankings inside the decision support system to analyse the level of
current performance and to identify the most appropriate level of
future commitments that are required from each participating
organisations.  The main focus of the collaborative decision support
system is the availability of heterogenous consolidated data at the
right time and right place.

Topic 4: Query Optimization for Spatio-Temporal Data

Warehouse
With the increase popularity large heterogenous data repository and
corporate data warehousing, there is a need to increase the
efficiency of queries used for analysis.  This case is even stronger in
database environment that holds both spatial and temporal
information.

Spatio-Temporal data includes all time slices pertinent to each

object or entity.  For example, an area/suburb in a city may have
static properties which include area name, description, population,
etc.  However, for each particular area there will be spatial
information (coordinates, shape, etc) and time slice when a set of
values for the above properties are valid. In the example above, an
area may change shape/size (eg. enlarged to cover more spaces) in
the next few years due to some government policy, while still being
the same area name.  The main focus of this topic is to investigate
the ways to optimize queries that are used to analyse the above
spatio-temporal data.

Assoc. Prof. Karl Reed

Topic 1: Theoretical issues. MAKING THE UNKNOWN
KNOWN-FORMALISING THE DISCOVERY  OF DESIGN
KNOWLEDGE
There is a famous one liner by Donald Rumsfeld. "The unknown
unknowns" [1]. One of the big problems faced by designers is.what
is "out there" that we don't know about, but is relevant to the
design?" That is, what are the unknown unknowns?

So, what does this mean for system development and design? Can
this be formalized? Do we do it already? Where does Domain
Expertise come into this?

This sounds hard, but, may not be, and, if you can do it well, it is
publishable.

The New World of Real World Systems

Topic 2: HOW SHOULD WE DESIGN SYSTEMS THAT HAVE

TO SURVIVE FOR THE NEXT 50 YEARS?
Technology is changing, however, the small system you build today
may still be in use in 50 years from now.  OK, you are the
Government of a country developing a new Social Welfare
system[2].  You want it to survive for the next 50 years. What
exactly does this mean? How would you do this?

How serious is this problem? What would make it possible? What

would make it difficult?

A good version of this will get published.

What we DO know…

FACT 1.  Very expensive systems survive for decades even if or

especially when they are mission critical. (Find some important
examples).
FACT 2. Technology is changing rapidly. How do we cope with this in
the above context?

FACT 3.  We know a lot about component based design, software

re-use and related issue. How do we bring all this together so that
systems can deal with change?

Web Browser technology

Topic 3:  WEB SEARCH NAVIGATION AND SUPPORT

SYSTEM (become famous)
In today's world, web searches are major activity undertaken by
people for industrial, research and other reasons. They involve
searches across a very wide range of web pages in a wide range of
sources. The searcher may down load pages, extract information
from pages, and, in the process, create a history of link
activations.  The problem people face is what happens if the
searcher has to stop, and resume the process days later.

Purpose of this project is to provide support for people using Google

as a search engine. A major problem here is keeping track of the
sites and documents visited and viewed, and downloaded. Search's
may be spread over several sessions, and users need to be able to
resume a search.The project requires the development of software
and the design of a complete, zero adoption cost tool.

Topic 4: Essential knowledge for web-site developers

Given the current IT situation, web-sites are likely to be a major
aspect of businesses and organisations for the next 50
years.  However, horror stories abound.  What are the categories of
knowledge that web-site developers should have, if this new
business aid is to be genuinely socially useful aid, rather than a
public nuisance?

The goal here is the development of degree program, and, the

documentation of knowledge collections needed.
Topic 5: BROWSER SEARCH PRECISION IMPROVEMENT
How often does a Google search produce stuff that seems to
have no relationship to what you really wanted!?

The purpose of this project is to find some simple means of

improving browser precision.  That is, I want to find only items
which are really useful to me.

To do this, we need to first explore the current query systems, and

document them.  Then to propose means of getting simpler results,
and to implement a prototype.  You will need to develop a
knowledge of "data mining", to extract classification material from
the returns from browsers.

Topic 6: Automatic Web-page Link Clicking Minimisation

Lots of sites I use need several links to display/access very simple
information.  So, I seem to spend ages linking around hyperspace to
see information which would easily fit on one page.  Could I build a
tool which would allow a user to define a new, single page, that had
all the data concerned?

GAMES TECHNOLOGY

Topic 7: MEASURING IMAGE QUALITY OF GAMES USING

DIGITAL CAMERA  APPROACHES
The digital camera industry has put a lot of work into image quality
assessment, both subjective and objective.  Image quality is of
course a major concern in the gaming industry, however, they face
the problem of high-speed image generation, rather than simply
recording images.  At the same time, there are now medium
resolution (14MP and above) digital cameras that can capture (and,
process) up to 10 or  even 14 frames per second, at full resolution.

As I said, the digital camera domain has various measure of image

quality.  How do they map onto the needs of games, or don't
they?  If not, what should we do?
 ZAIA projects-Zero Adoption Impact Applications

Topic 8: Design Rules for ZAIA Applications

OK, how much time do you waste learning to use a new software
package? And, how many computer systems that you know of
invisible, or nearly invisible in the sense that they assist you BUT,
don't intrude on your non-computer work patterns? Simple
examples that you may be familiar with are ABS, Traction Control,
automobile engine management systems.  But, what other ones can
you think of? Of course, this sounds like ubiquitous computing,
however, we are going beyond this.  Our goal is the production of
systems which can be installed in a work environment, either
computerised or not, and have almost zero learning effort, but,
which will make life easier.

How do we design things like this?

THIS PROJECT..  What should the design-rules look like for a system

of the ZAIA type look like? One way of doing this would be to design
and demonstrate such a tool, such as tabbase[3]

Literature on the use of tables and their automation would need to

be surveyed.

Topic 9: ULTRA USER FRIENDLY LIBRARY SYSTEM TASK

ORIENTED COMPUTING
Currently, library catalog systems place a massive load on users
who must make many steps to locate an item. In practice, users
identify a "Target", that is, in three ways.

1. They have a complete citation for the Target obtained from a

publication
2. They have a Google search result and wish to obtain the
Target
3. They don't know what they are looking for, so, they are
making a key-word based search.
For a start, we are interested in the first case. How can we make
this VERY easy for the user, so that they provide the citation, and,
are told "here is the item", or "here is where it is, but, you need to
buy it", without any(or only under weird cases)  intervention by
themselves?

Thie project may involve collaboration with the LTU library.

CLOUD COMPUTING

Topic 10: The Impact of Cloud Computing on Component

Based  Design
Exactly how can a Cloud based systems be used in Component
Based design? Develop design rules, and show some case-studies.

See also ST12.01               TEST FRAMEWORKS FOR CLOUD

COMPUTING

Software Testing

Topic 11: IMPROVING SOFTWARE QUALITY BY

CONSTRUCTING         OPERATIONAL PROFILES BASED ON
BLACK-BOX TEST RESULTS
It has been suggested by the author that one way of improving
product quality is by building a wrapper around a system that blocks
those case that were found to be handled incorrectly during testing.

This project investigates this idea and proposes and demonstrates

deign rules and tools for achieving this for different classes of
software product.

Topic 12: TEST FRAMEWORKS FOR CLOUD COMPUTING

How will developers test cloud applications? What exactly will the
changes to Black Box testing for example be for clouds? This project
requires analysis of both Cloud systems and testing and also of the
way in which Clouds will work?

The thesis topic is to survey this field, define the problem, and
produce a simple tool, if possible.

Topic 13: TEST HARNESESS - DERIVING WHITE BOX

COVERAGE ANALYSERS FROM MACHINE-READABLE
DESIGNS.
In the past, people have built systems that tracked the execution of
a system, checking that the actual procedures/classes
etc.  executed are those presumed to be the ones that should be
executed for a particular test case. In addition, the value of data at
specific points in the execution process might be checked against
expected values.

However, this requires that there is a close correlation between the

design representation and the code. That is, it needs to be possible
to easily (and preferably automatically), to generate the "hooks" in
the code that will make this possible.

The tester wants to be able to specify a test script in terms of the

names used in the design, and have the harness execute the code,
doing the required checking.

The thesis topic is to survey this field, define the problem, and
produce a simple tool, if possible.

Specification Systems

Topic 14: UNAMBIGUOUS, INFORMAL SPECIFICATION

TECHNIQUES
Discussions of specification capture raise the issue of a suitable
language for system specification of software systems. This must be
sufficiently unambiguous for  designers to be sure that a
specification has been captured, and sufficiently informal for users
to agree that they  understand what has been achieved.  The goal is
to develop a suitable language and to discuss and formalize the
issues involved.

Topic 15: THE USE OF INVIVO/NUDIST IN REQUIREMENTS

ANALYSIS
NUDIST is a tool developed by QSR, a La Trobe SPIN off
company  started by Lyn and Tom Richards (Tom was a Reader in
this Dept., Lyn in Sociology). The product was initially developed at
La Trobe.

Its use is to analyse qualitative data, to find common ideas and

threads of evidence. This project would look at its use in
Requirements Engineering.

Re-use

Topic 16: LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF RE-USE

The purpose of this project is to investigate what, for the want of a
better name, I call the linguistic aspects of re-use. Re-use is the
process of using existing components to fabricate a system. A major
part of the problem (apart from the issue of the existence of re-
useable components), is the problem of classifying and then
retrieving the components.

Much emphasis is often placed on the classification of the

components. However, experience is that components can be hard
to retrieve since the classifications do not always match either the
application domain or the possible purpose proposed for the
module. Alternatively, there may be some implied re-use possible
which is not discovered.

One possible explanation for this may be that the form of

classification used, the language, may either be too restrictive, or,
that there do not exist appropriate mapping's from the classification
language to the problem space in which the component could be
used.  Part of this could be due the absence of suitable "Universes
of Discourse", i.e., commonly understood meanings which are not
stated explicitly. Another could be that specifications may imply
their inverses, or, that common functions can be deduced by
expanding a specification, making use of the "Universe of Discourse"
that is valid for that point in the design.

The purpose of this project is to try to identify some method which

might be used to address these issues. It would not be expected
that a complete solution would necessarily be discovered.

Project Management and Process Recording

Topic 17: Recording process enactments in student team

projects (with Dr Torab Torabi)
Student software engineering projects such as PRJ involve different
projects each being undertaken by more than one team. This means
that there may be different process models used, and, multiple
instances of similar process models being applied independently by
multiple, independent teams. The purpose of the topic is to develop
a formal plan for capturing process execution data, and, for its
analysis. You will need some familiarity with statistics, however, the
results would be REALLY important. You will need to do a literature
survey on process recording AND experimental software
engineering.

Good results will be publishable, and, the model could become

widely used. The history of process recording is interesting.

Topic 18: THE ROLE OF ONTOLOGY CONSTRUCTION IN

SOFTWARE   DEVELOPMENT PROJECTS
It has been said that software projects are often a process of
knowledge gathering. However, this process seems to be covert
rather than overt. In addition, the process of construction of
taxonomies is quite well known, but the extent to which it plays a
role in software projects in terms of domain knowledge is probably
known covertly, but is not remarked upon. The purpose of this
project is to examine the knowledge acquisition activities in
software development and to see how they may be described as
taxonomy construction exercises.

MISCELLANEOUS SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Topic 19: Prescriptive Taxonomy-based Methods for GQM

The Goal/Question/Metric paradigm for constructing programs for
measuring software (quality, performance) was developed by Basili
in the early 1980's. The idea is simple, and has been the subject of
many papers and some tool development. However, in practice, the
process of developing questions that lead to metrics is extremely
difficult to describe. My view is that the problem may be based upon
a knowledge acquisition process which may assisted by taxonomies
of the application and measurement domains.

Topic 20: The use of taxonomies in safety critical systems

design[4]
Successful SCS implementation depends upon the designers ability
to interpret the spec., and to identify unexpected behaviours
implied by that spec. Alternatively, we need to ensure the behaviour
is predictable given unexpected inputs. However, since the
behaviour/input is unexpected, by definition, the people writing the
spec. didn't see either. Is it possible that taxonomies may help with
this? Obviously, we need some processes that expose possible fault
conditions in terms of an external event that was not foreseen, and
hence was not considered or checked.

As an example, on July 25  2000, a Concorde taking off Charles De

th

Gaulle airport in Paris crashed killing all on board and four people in
the hotel it hit.

The  aircraft's tyres hit a piece of metal that had fallen from a DC10
that had departed earlier. This caused the tyres to rupture and fly
into the air and rupture the fuel tank in the wing causing large fire.
The plane subsequently crashed.

The design issue is:..

 Would it be reasonable for designers to ensure the fuel tanks are
not ruptured by burst tyres? I don't know if it would be.

Would it be reasonable to design the fuel tanks so that they would

not be punctured by a 50cal machine gun round? Possibly. If this
WAS a design requirement, then it would probably mean the fuel
tank would survive the debris from a burst tyre.

Topic 20: safety critical systems (SCS) designers build complex

systems reliably and with low error rates. Can their tecniques be
used for general system development?
We know that generally, SCS are one of software development's
success stories. Sure, there are problems, however, the SCS
developers do very well indeed. Can these techniques be used to
normal" system development?

Dr Andrew Skabar
Research areas of interest:

 Pattern Recognition
 Data Mining
 Information Retrieval
Topic 1: Document Clustering and Classification
The management of unstructured text-based data (i.e., data not
amenable for storage inside a relational database – emails, faxes,
web pages, etc.) is a major problem pervading the information
technology industry. It is widely accepted that at least 80% of the
data held by companies is unstructured. Over recent years there
has been a growing interest in creating automatic systems that
assist users in managing documents such as emails. This project
provides scope for students to learn about different facets of dealing
with unstructured (text) data, and in particular, about how
clustering and classification techniques can be successfully applied
to it. To take this topic, students must have received a strong mark
in CSE2AIF, and one or more of CSE3ALR and CSE3CI. Students
should also have some background in both the Python and Matlab
computer programming languages.

Topic 2: Text processing incorporating semantics

Whereas information retrieval is typically conducted on text at the
document level, in recent years researchers have become
increasingly interested in also dealing with shorter segments of
text; e.g., text at the sentence level. One of the difficulties of
dealing with sentence-level text is that the similarity measures
typically used at the document level (i.e., measures such as Cosine
similarity, which are based on a vector-space representation), are
not applicable to analysing sentence-level text due the lack of word
co-occurrence. Consequently, it is usually necessary include
semantic information provided by way of Wordnet or other lexical
resources. This project provides scope for students to learn about
different facets of semantic text processing, and to apply
appropriate techniques to some problem of the student's choosing.
To take this topic, students must have received a strong mark in
CSE2AIF, and one or more of CSE3ALR and CSE3CI. Students
should also have experience with the Python programming
language, and preferably also Matlab.

Topic 3: Open Project in Data Mining

Data mining is the process of sorting through large amounts of data
in search for novel and useful information that can be used to aid
decision making. It is often used in business intelligence and
financial analysis systems, but is increasingly being used in the
sciences to extract information from the enormous data sets
generated by modern experimental and observational methods. It
has been described as "the nontrivial extraction of implicit,
previously unknown, and potentially useful information from data"
and "the science of extracting useful information from large data
sets or databases." This project provides wide scope for students to
apply or develop data mining techniques for some domain (i.e.,
application area) of their choosing. Students are invited to propose
a domain and to discuss this with the supervisor. To take this topic,
students must have received a strong mark in CSE2AIF, and one or
 more of CSE3ALR and CSE3CI. Students should also be proficient in
Matlab.

Associate Professor Ben Soh

Areas of interest:

 Wireless Communications, and Mobile and Pervasive

Computing
 Information System Research, Design & Technology, and Cloud
Computing
 Fault-Tolerant Computing, and Information & Networking
Systems
 Business Process and Workflow & Supply Chain Management
Note: Details of each project will be finalised prior to signing
up.

Topic 1: Wireless Communications, and Mobile and Pervasive

Computing
 Foundations, Standards, Protocols and Algorithms
 Pervasive Infrastructures, Services and Applications
 Wireless Sensor and Ad Hoc Networks on: (1) Security &
Privacy, and Reliability; (2) Intrusion Detection and Error Control;
and others.
Topic 2: Information System Research, Design & Technology
and Cloud Computing
 Internet-Based Technology relating to: (1) Cloud Computing;
(2) Web Availability and Reliability; (3) Fault-Tolerant IS, (4) IS
Research.
 Web Intelligence focusing on: (1) Information Filtering and
Retrieval; (2) Searching and Browsing; (3) Data Storage with Grid
Intelligence; (4) Backend Database Security, Backup & Recovery.
 Topic 3: Performance and Security & Safety in Information,
Database & Networking Systems
Security Foundations with regard to: (1) Information System
Authorisation & Access Control; (2) Intrusion Detection and
Prevention; (3) Cryptography and Secure Communications; (4)
Information Forensics, Recovery and Healing; (5) Database Security
and Backup & Recovery; and (6) Information Security Risk
Management.

 Security and Safety in Information, Database & Networking

Systems and Cloud Computing regarding: (1) Security & Privacy;
(2) Trust Management and Security; (3) Web and Web-Services
Security; (4) Security and Safety in Ad Hoc and Sensor Networks.
Topic 4: Business Process and Workflow & Supply Chain
Management
 Business Process and Workflow & Supply Chain Foundations in
terms of: (1) Modelling and Design Techniques; (2) Implementation
and Language; (3) Interoperability.
 Business Process and Management relating to: (1) Security
Control; (2) Dynamic Workflow Control; (3) Service-Oriented
Computing; and others.

Dr Torab Torabi
Research areas of interest:

 Software Engineering
 Ø  Mobile Computing
 Process Modelling
 Simulation.
Topic 1: Maritime Simulation
The research will investigate the use of AI techniques for better
path prediction or accident avoidance or port management. The
outcome is preferably will be able to feed in and out information to
 the simulation environment. The research will preferably will be with
the Maritime Simulation Lab in La Trobe.

Topic 2: Dynamic Context and Applications

In services with huge data, information is updated very frequently,
though each user may need part of the information within certain
context. This research is set to research concept of Dynamic
Context. The main focus will be on conceptual specification of the
context. Once such a model has been formally defined, it should be
able to apply this to large system with many stakeholders with
different information needs. Knowledge of XML is necessary.

Topic 3: Task Computing

Users in different environments may use different smart devices to
complete their activities (tasks).  This aim of this research is to
investigate and develop optimum methods for users to make use of
smart devices in their surroundings to accomplish their tasks.  This
project will require knowledge of device communication and mobile
programming.

Topic 4: Moving Objects / Clusters and Applications

The aim of research is to investigate and develop methodologies for
moving objects or cluster and provide prediction and decision
support in applications such as disaster management.

The research uses the standards for spatial and weather to integrate
information in different domain and provide current context and
prediction of objects or clusters in such environments.  This
research requires knowledge of XML and standards in weather and
good knowledge of programming.

Dr Prakash Veeraraghavan
Research areas of interest:

 Computer and Network Security

 Digital Watermarking
 Biometric Based authentication schemes
 Mobile and Ad hoc networks
 Next Generation Protocols
Topic 1: Power aware routing in mobile Networks
The energy-efficiency problem in wireless network design has
received significant attention in the past few years. Most of the
works are for designing efficient routing schemes because
traditional routing schemes designed for the Internet tend to
consume more power. The objective of this research study is to
design a new power-aware routing scheme for ad hoc and sensor
networks.

(This topic is abstract in nature and requires a good aptitude for

mathematics)

Topic 2: Security in cloud storage

"The two biggest concerns about cloud storage are reliability and
security. Clients aren't likely to entrust their data to another
company without a guarantee that they'll be able to access their
information whenever they want and no one else will be able to get
at it". Thus it is very important to ensure that proper encryption
algorithm is in place to protect the data access. In this project the
student is expected to review the literature and come out with an
efficient and light-weighted algorithm for protecting the data.

Topic 3: Audio Compression and Watermarking schemes

Unlike data compressions which are mostly lossless, audio
compression are mostly lossy. Depending upon the type of
equipment used for reproduction, different audio compression codec
(like MP3, RM etc.) are used. It is relatively a new technique to
watermark along with compressing audio. The objective of this
research project is study various audio compression schemes, their
performance over different networks and the strength of the
watermarking schemes used for ownership.
 (This topic is abstract in nature and requires a good aptitude for
mathematics and music)

Topic 4: Scheduling in Biosensors

A biosensor is an analytical device for the detection of an analyte
that combines a biological component with a physicochemical
detector component.

It consists of 3 parts:

1. The sensitive biological element (biological material (eg.

tissue, microorganisms, organelles, cell receptors, enzymes,
antibodies, nucleic acids, etc), a biologically derived material or
biomimic) The sensitive elements can be created by biological
engineering.the transducer or the detector element (works in a
physicochemical way; optical, piezoelectric, electrochemical, etc.)
that transforms the signal resulting from the interaction of the
analyte with the biological element into another signal (i.e.,
transducers) that can be more easily measured and quantified;
2. associated electronics or signal processors that are primarily
responsible for the display of the results in a user-friendly way. This
sometimes accounts for the most expensive part of the sensor
device, however it is possible to generate a user friendly display
that includes transducer and sensitive element.
3. How sensors collect information (associated electronics and
signal processors), organize it effectively and transmit to the base
for real-time processing is an important problem. This research is
focused on various Data aggregation and scheduling techniques.
Topic 5: Computer forensic and investigation
Cryptography helps people to achieve confidentiality, integrity and
authenticity while communicating with unknown (or known) people
over the unknown network. Intrusion detection System (IDS) is a
way to detect intrusion through histories. However, once an
attacker hacked into a network or computer, it is necessary to make
a thorough study on what information the attackers are looking for
 and how to collect evidences for prosecution. The process is more
OS dependant; the process also depends on the software used.

This introductory project on Computer Forensic and crime

investigation, aims at making a good revision on various techniques
available in the literature, establish their strengths and weaknesses
and propose a suitable improvements.

(Students opting for project must have strong mathematical

aptitude and strong programming and OS skills).

Reader & Assoc. Prof. Justin Wang

Research areas of interest:

 Bioinformatics
 Visual Information Systems
 Computational Intelligence Systems and Its Applications
Topic 1: Multiple Face Recognition System Design
Development of  multiple face recognition (MFR) systems is  useful
to domain applications such as bank security management.  In this
project, students will experience the whole process of  MFR systems
design and implementation. The key steps include database
building, eigen face based recognition algorithm,  clustering and
learning classification techniques, system implementation and
robustness analysis.

Topic 2: Learning Pseudo Metrics using Neural Networks with

Random Weights (RWNNs)
Learning pseudo metrics (LPMs) can be used in data mining tasks
and previous studies indicated its power to improve clustering and
classification performance on semantic data. Neural Networks with
Random Weights (RWNNs) is a class of random basis function
networks, which have demonstrated good potential to be employed
in modelling large scale of data in high dimensional space. This
project aims to develop a framework of RWNN-based learning
pseudo metrics for data mining. Benchmark data sets including
semantic clustering and classification will be employed in this study.
Comparison against commonly used Euclidean distance for the
problem solving will be carried out.

Topic 3: Fuzzy Classification Systems for DNA Motifs

Identification
Development of fuzzy classification systems is  interesting and
important for detecting transcription factor binding sites in DNA
sequences. Extraction and optimization of detection rules will be
addressed in this study. To develop such rule-based intelligent
systems for DNA motif identification, features of k-mers will be
extracted firstly. Then, fuzzy rule extraction and optimization
techniques will be addressed. Some real data sets will be used to
evaluate the proposed systems. An bioinformatics tool is expected
to be developed through this study. Comprehensive comparisons to
existing tools will be carried out to demonstrate knowledge
advancement.

Topic 4: One-class Classification Systems Design and

Applications in Bioinformatics
To deal with very imbalanced classification problems, one-class
classification (OCC) systems have been developed by many
researchers over the last decade. This project aims to combine the
traditional OCC system design with ensemble learning techniques to
improve the classification performance.  The proposed framework
can be termed as ensemble OCC (EOCC) systems, and will be
applied to binding sites recognition in DNA promoter sequences.

Topic 5: Fuzzy Rule Extraction for Time Series Analysis with

Business Applications
To build fuzzy inference systems or neuro-fuzzy intelligent systems,
the extraction of a set of fuzzy rules from numerical data plays a
key role for successful modelling or forecasting time series data.
This project aims to further develop robust extraction of fuzzy
rulebase using association analysis in data mining. It is expected
 that the generated rulebase will result in a more robust fuzzy
system against some uncertainties presence. Some typical business
applications will be employed for assessing the merits and
shortcomings of the proposed techniques. Students will have a good
opportunity to further develop their knowledge base and
implementation skills with this project.

Topic 6: Robust Algorithms for DNA Motif Discovery

Computational approached for motif discovery in DNA sequences
demonstrated promising results. However, the existing tools for
motif finding are lack of reliability and scalability, and the obtained
results vary from each run of the programs. This uncertainty makes
the biologists unsatisfied because they do not know which result will
be further verified in wet laboratory. Therefore, it is meaningful to
develop more reliable searching tools to reduce the cost in labs.
Students to take this project need strong programming skills,
knowledge on data mining and computational intelligence.

Bendigo Campus
Supervision of Melbourne Campus Students by Academics
from the Bendigo Section

Proposed delivery mode:

 Formal weekly email between students and supervisors.

 Weekly communication by video link - appropriate facilities will
be provided at both sections of the department.
 Other communication will occur by phone, email and video link
as required.
 One academic from Melbourne campus will be allocated to act
as a co-supervisor.
Students who have a supervisor from Bendigo Campus will need to
attend a short fortnightly meeting with their Melbourne co-
supervisor to discuss their progress.
 How to "sign up"
Please see our staff page for a list of academic staff located at the
Bendigo Campus.

Please contact the Bendigo staff member(s) whose thesis topics are
of interest to you. When you have decided on an appropriate topic
and wish to fill out the required form for supervision from a Bendigo
academic, please use the Thesis Administration Form available from
the General Office. At the same time, a co-supervisor from
Melbourne campus will be determined and confirmed by the Bendigo
main supervisor. The Bendigo academic's signature will not be
required.  Acceptance of the supervision from the Bendigo academic
will be confirmed by email to the 4th Year Coordinator.

Academics at the Bendigo Section of the department welcome

enquiries from students at the Minor Thesis, Major Thesis and PhD
levels.

Dr Ka Ching Chan

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 Dissertations for Information Technology
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 Abdulrab, Shathi

The Impact of Culture on Information Technology Adoption in Yemeni Universities

Ph.D. thesis, Robert Morris University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Akoma, Ahunna Margaux

Decision-making, information communication technology, and data analysis by

school leaders about student achievement

Ph.D. thesis, Teachers College, Columbia University.

  View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Almasri, Rana

The use of mobile technology in education by international students in United

States universities: Perceptions regarding mobile applications for English language
learning

Ph.D. thesis, Robert Morris University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Alrushiedat, Nimer Khalaf

Anchored Asynchronous Online Discussions: Facilitating Engagement,

Collaboration, Social Learning, and Self-Efficacy in a Blended Environment

Ph.D. thesis, The Claremont Graduate University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Alvarez Xochihua, Omar

A mixed-response intelligent tutoring system based on learning from demonstration

 Ph.D. thesis, Texas A&M University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Anastasiade, Jordan V.

Instructional strategies for developing problem-solving skills: The worked-example

effect using ill-structured visual pattern recognition problems

Ph.D. thesis, Capella University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Anderson, Timothy R.

The Viability of a Software Tool to Assist Students in the Review of Literature

Ph.D. thesis, Grand Canyon University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Badawood, Ashraf Mohammad

A Systematic Approach to Faculty Development Toward Improved Capability in

Tertiary Teaching in a Blended Learning Environment
 Doctor of Management in Information Technology thesis, Lawrence Technological University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Bakke, Christine K.

Perceptions of professional and educational skills learning opportunities made

available through K-12 robotics programming

Ph.D. thesis, Capella University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Ball, Albert L.

A Comparison of Users' Personal Information Sharing Awareness, Habits, and

Practices in Social Networking Sites and E-Learning Systems

Ph.D. thesis, Nova Southeastern University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Barnes, Brenda C.
 Use and Acceptance of Information and Communication Technology Among
Laboratory Science Students

Ph.D. thesis, Walden University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Bernacki, Matthew

The influence of self-regulated learning and prior knowledge on knowledge

acquisition in computer-based learning environments

Ph.D. thesis, Temple University.

 View Abstract  

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 Bledsoe, Johnny Mark

A Quantitative Study of Factors Related to Adult E-Learner's Adoption of Web 2.0

Technology

Doctor of Philosophy thesis, Walden University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Boileau, Timothy
 The effect of interactive technology on informal learning and performance in a
social setting

Ph.D. thesis, Wayne State University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Bonner, David M.

A study of the technological, instructional, and motivational factors affecting PHR

certification exam outcomes

Ph.D. thesis, University of North Texas.

 View Abstract  

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 Bowers, Kevin Westmoreland

Constructing the new classroom: College student perceptions of classes using

Second Life

Ph.D. thesis, University of Florida.

 View Abstract  

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 Brennan, William Vincent

 School principals and virtual learning: A catalyst to personal and organizational
learning

Ph.D. thesis, Fordham University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Broberg, Loretta L.

A grounded theory approach to examining design and usability guidelines for four-
year tribal college web sites

Doctor of Business Administration thesis, Capella University.

 View Abstract  

Add to Collection

 Brock, Martha Anne

The effectiveness of distance education for computer application software

instruction versus the cost of development and implementation

Ph.D. thesis, Mississippi State University.

 View Abstract  

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 Bush, Michael H.
 Digital course materials: A case study of the Apple iPad in the academic
environment

Ph.D. thesis, Pepperdine University.

 View Abstract  

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Note: documents in Portable Document Format (PDF) require Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.0 or
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  E-Commerce / E-Business
2.1.1          Advertisements Over Cell Phone Networks – Is it a Successful Strategy; A Survey of
British Youth’s Attitude towards Receiving Advertisements over Cell Phones

2.1.2          Exploring the Difference between E-Business Model and E-Business Strategy through
Extended Examples

2.1.3          Is it Viable to Completely Curb Software Piracy in the Underdeveloped Nations;

Challenges and Possible Solutions?

2.1.4          Determining Factors that Affect Users’ Level of Trust and Sense of Security in E-
Commerce Applications

2.1.5          E-Tourism Intermediaries in UK; Factors that Affect Customers’ Level of Satisfaction

2.1.6          Conduction Virtual Business in 3D Internet; The Future Outlook of Business over
Virtual Worlds

Influenced by the widespread popularity and advantages of e-commerce for modern day
business organizations, governments across the globe are also trying to reap the power of
information and communication technologies to reach their customers and provide effective
services.

2.2            E-Government
2.2.1          Structural transformation towards e-government in the South West of China: Moving
beyond the Four Stage Model

2.2.2          Assessing E-Government System in Pakistan (or any other Underdeveloped Country);
A Content Analysis of Various Government Websites

2.2.3          M-Government; Benefits and Outcomes of Mobile Government for Connected

Societies

Multi Agent Based Systems enable a higher level of collaboration among various agents working
together to achieve a common goal. Coinciding with the developments within the area of
artificial intelligence, multi-agent based systems are moving towards higher level of
adaptability. Stimulations programs are similarly an important stream of intelligent computer
programs that are aimed to work upon highly complex scenario.

2.3            Multi Agent Based System

2.3.1          An Overview of Design Patterns Utilized for Developing Multi Agent Systems (MAS)

2.3.2          Analyzing the Dynamics and Design Patters for Developing Adaptive Multi-Agent-
System (MAS); A Step towards Mass Customization through Intelligent Manufacturing
Information Systems

2.3.3          Creating a Multi-Mobile-Agent Architecture for Developing a Collaborative System

Which Elapses across Product’s Lifecycle

2.4            Artificial Intelligence

2.4.1          Search Engine Optimization for Dynamic Websites; An Evaluation of Existing
Knowledge of SEO for Dynamic Websites

2.4.2          Application of Multi-Agent Systems Along with Multiple Artificial Potential Fields in
Car Games

2.4.3          Creating an Appraisal Module for Virtual Agents in Order to Produce Believable
Emotions

2.4.4          Designing and Implementing a Membership Card Generation System for

Hypermarkets by Utilizing Clustering, Optimization and Anomaly Detection Techniques

2.5            Simulation Modeling to help Decision Makers

2.5.1          An Overview of Various Business Stimulation Tools; Evaluation their Impact upon
Student Learning in Tertiary Business School

Information and communication technologies have greatly enhanced efficiencies in business

processes making organizational functions more effective. Likewise, the multimedia
advancements have provided more robust information sharing, socialization and entertainment
platforms. Business process designs and multimedia information systems are key research areas
in information and communication technologies.

2.6            Business Process Design

2.6.1          Evaluating Project Management Methodologies for Information Technology
Development in Pakistan; A Case Study of National Database Registration Authority (NADRA)

2.6.2          Exploring Fitting Enabling Technologies to Boost E-Commerce Success of Apparel and
Footwear Industry in UK

2.6.3          Assessing the Impact of Information Technologies in Implementing Management

Control Systems in Technology Start Ups and SMEs in UK

2.6.4          The Use of ERP in Practice; an Investigation of End Users Approval of ERP System in
Large Organization in (any Undeveloped/Developed Country)
2.7            Multimedia Information Systems
2.7.1          An Investigation into the Negative Effects of Social Media and the Challenges it
creates in Crisis Management

2.7.2          Examine How the Communication Technology Revolution Influences People, Process
and Strategy

2.7.3          Does the Media Technology Has an Impact upon Child Development; A Study of
Primary School Goers in UK

2.7.4          The Impact of Media Technologies on the Physical Development of Teenagers; A

Comparative Analysis

2.7.5          Encouraging the Use of E-Commerce in Saudi Arabia in The light if Existing Challenges

The growing power of internet, software as a service (SAAS) is a blooming trend which opens
many new research opportunities.

2.8            SAAS
2.8.1          Integrating ERP System with Cloud Services; Implementing ERP Integration over
SAAS, PAAS, and IAAS

2.8.2          An Overview of the SAP Implementation Processes and the Types of SAP Failures

2.8.3          Determining the Causes of Sap Implementation Failures in Small Industrial Firms in
UK

2.8.4          Usability Analysis and Evaluation of Microsoft Dynamics Online; Developing a

Framework for CRM Solutions’ Evaluation

2.8.5          Implications of Cloud Computing For Multi Media Industry

With the advancement in information and communication technologies, security remains one
of the biggest concerns and similarly an important research area.

2.9            Security
2.9.1          Utilizing Keystroke Analysis as an Additional Security Measure to Password Security
in Web Applications

2.9.2          An Investigation of Emerging Risks Associated with Online Banking

2.9.3          Investigating Factors That Determine Customers Use of Online Banking Tools; A
Qualitative Analysis of Customers in China
2.9.4          A Survey of Security Strategies for Non-Internet Enabled Software and Applications

2.9.5          Investigating Security Threats over Android Mobile Environment

2.10       General
2.10.1      An Overview of Key Enabling Technologies Required for Creating Information Agent
Technology for the Internet

2.10.2      An Information Retrieval System for Scientists; Creating an Information Agent

Technology

2.10.3      An Information Retrieval System for Students; Creating an Information Agent

Technology

2.10.4      Ethical Challenges Associated with Testing Software and Applications through Live
Customer Data; Recommending Steps to Overcome These Concerns
Purpose of the Tools and Software:
MATLAB:

 MATLAB is numerical computing environment and fourth generation programming language.

 MATLAB user for simulation, verification and designing of wireless systems.

SCILAB:

 SCILAB is an open source and a numerical and high level programming language.
 Targets the analysis of network algorithm and protocols

JAVA:

 Java is a multi-paradigm object oriented programming structured language.

 Common Network the performance of computing networks.

DOTNET FRAMEWORK:

 DOTNET is a software framework library developed by Microsoft

 Extensible, by used and managed implementation of internet service are facilitated.

PRIMULATOR 2:

 It is a basic graphical network simulator which needs a java run time environment.

QUALNET:

 Commercial version of Glomosim.

Research Fields in Information Technology:

 Sense Response Applications

 Mobile Wi-Max and Wi-Fi
 Human Computer Interface
 Asynchronous Chips
 Body Area Networks
 MANET
 Neural Network
 Optical Networking
 Packet Sniffers
 Parallel Computing
 Rapid Prototyping
 Electronics and communication
 Computer vision
 Metropolitan and Local area networks
 Information and database systems
 Machine learning algorithms
 Natural language and speech processing
  Human computer interaction
 Ubiquitous computing/distributed systems
 Cryptography mechanisms on WWW
 Soft computing tools
 Complex systems modelling

List of Thesis Title for Information Technology Students:

 Measuring Framework for the value of government institution analysis

 Design Canonical Mathematical Model for Cardio vascular disease diagnostics
 Information management systems revitalization using Hadoop Technology
 Telecommunication systems and complex distributed information systems privacy
assessment
 Information technology trends applied on agriculture field

              Information Technology is a vast field. The above mentioned titles are some of the
topics that are currently popular in the circuit. We offer thesis in all the current topics of
Information technology. So make use of us and shine brighter in the field of Information
Technology.
1. How Digital Tools Make the Workplace Less Productive
2. Hackers Anonymous: How Vigilant Hacker Groups Target Terrorists
3. How IT Helped Globalization: Why People Are Not More Culturally Friendly Now
4. Internet Privacy: Is There Such a Thing?
5. Digital Reading: How the Brain Has Changed as a Result
6. Free Speech: How a Guaranteed Right Has Changed with IT Advancements
7. The Changes to Neuroplasticity: How Tablet Devices Have Created Focus
Problems
8. The Use of IT Filters by Governments to Influence Society
9. The Generational Gap: How Generations Are Further Apart Because of
Technology
10. Internet Gambling: Exacerbating Additions with Computer Technology
11. The Impact Internet Has on Pornography
12. Digital Imaging: How It Impacts an Industry of Your Choosing
13. Internet Marketing and the Growth of the Dying Marketing Industry
14. National Security Risks and Computer Viruses
15. Computer Crimes: How Governments Are Hacking Data too
16. The Growth of the Distance Education: IT in the Modern Classroom
17. Information Retrieval Methods: Why Wiping a Hard Drive Is No Longer Enough
18. The Fine Line Between Ethical and Unethical Hacking: How a Misstep Can Ruin
Lives
19. The Use of Simplified Data Processing in Modern IT
20. The Internet and Art: How Money Laundering Has Grown

Given that this is a thesis, you must remember that the topic should be something you
can address in such a way that you contribute more to the academic world. Don’t try to
cover something that has already been done. Be original. Take an existing idea or
something someone else has written about and use it as a platform for expounding
upon a smaller or larger facet of that work. It is important to remember that while you
are looking out for your topic, your overarching thesis goal is to solve a real problem in
the world, contain real theoretical work, and have real empirical results. You want to
connect your work to existing research and show how your work contributes in a
meaningful way.

Our professional thesis writing service is committed to provide PhD and Master’s

degree students with dissertation assistance in academic paper writing.