The Centre is offering three vacation scholarships. These will be awarded on a competitive basis. Details of the scholarships can be found here and here. The application closing date is 5:00pm 9 October 2009. The application form can be found here.
Information on the centre can be found here.
The scholars will be able to chose between the following projects.
Supervisors: Kim Marriott & Michael Wybrow
Dunnart is an open source constraint-based interactive diagramming editor developed by Michael Wybrow. It provides automatic layout that the author can customize by moving objects around and adding placement constraints. The project is to extend Dunnart to support hierarchical diagrams like family trees.
Kevin Korb & Ann Nicholson
Dates: December -
Jan
Pre-req: FIT3080 or equivalent background
Static
Bayesian networks (BNs) represent causal processes which may be
repeated, but
which do not change upon repetition. While simple in
concept, they are
nevertheless powerful representations for dealing
with systems showing
significant uncertainty about their outcomes, and
they are widely employed in
health care, ecological and environmental
sciences, manufacturing industries,
and government (see
www.norsys.com/clients.htm). A
great deal of effort has been put into
automating the learning of Bayesian
networks from data, including at
Monash, yielding our CaMML program (Causal
discovery via MML).
Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) represent causal
systems which
change over time, yielding time series data from
their
observation. Examples include all kinds of economic markets, such
as
stock markets and currencies, weather and climate systems, and human
disease
processes. DBNs extend the range of application of BNs in important
ways;
this project will implement and test simple mechanisms for
extending CaMML to
learn them from time series data.
Supervisor: Jon McCormack
Generalised cylinders are a geometric representation method originally developed for robotic vision and planning. For this project we are interested in developing a framework for the specification of biological form using generalised cylinders. This method is well suited to a generative, procedural specification and will be linked to a developmental model for generating biological form. The software developed will form a C++ framework developed for interactive media applications. The successful student for this scholarship should be familiar with basic concepts in computer graphics and geometric modelling and also have experience in C++ programming.
Supervisor: Jon McCormack
The CEMA Agent Modelling Framework is a C++ API for
agent-based modelling experiments in Artificial Life. The API consists of a
series of libraries that cover basic Agent modelling, GUI, Audio and Scheduling
tasks. This project will extend the framework by adding Classifier Systems as a
mechanism for agent learning. Classifier Systems provide agents with a mechanism
to learn and adapt their behaviour in response to their environment. The
project will implement a variety of algorithms including XCS, ZCS and XCSMH, and
M-LCS.
For a overview see:
Supervisors: Damminda Alahakoon
Humans accept inputs from many different sources and learn
incrementally from those sources. The accumulated information
is used in performing many activities. In the same way, if we look into the
field of text mining, there is variety of sources of information representing
the related things. Therefore building a central information processing unit
that merges all the different sources would be more advantages in information
processing and making decisions.
Technically, we can cluster different text sources and build a central incremental conceptual hierarchy merging the clustered results. In detail, there should be an ongoing central concept hierarchy that is adapted with the inputs from different sources. The clustered results should be merged to the hierarchy so that it forms the generalized view of all the input information sources. There are several text clustering algorithms that could be used for this purpose. Also there are several concept hierarchy building techniques. Information about these techniques will be provided to interested parties.
The main steps involving this process can be listed down as below.
Such a system can have huge potential value in many fields. Information from emails, other electronic documents and web sites identified by web crawlers could be put together to obtain an understanding of related fields, subfields etc as well as what words, concepts are related together.
Supervisors: David Albrecht, Ingrid Zukerman and Geoff
Webb
Imagine when you next visit a museum you are handed a device that
not only tells you about the current exhibit that you are viewing but also makes
recommendations about other exhibits that it believes you may be interested in.
For such a device to be useful it will need to interact with sensors that are
keeping track of your movements, and it will need to make predictions about your
trajectory and interests. There are are several types of sensors, and it is too
expensive to try each of them out in a real museum environment.
This
summer project is a continuation of an existing project, where we propose to
simulate the effect of different types of sensors on modelling visitors
behaviour in a museum.
You must be a competent programmer and familiar
with MATLAB (or at least familiarize yourself with MATLAB prior to the start of
the project).
Supervisors: Ingrid Zukerman, Gideon Kowadlo and Patrick Ye
In this project, we apply a probabilistic approach to develop a dialogue module for a robot. The project consists of the following modules: (1) speech recognition, (2) language interpretation, and (3) dialogue. Two post-doctoral fellows are currently working on different aspects of this project.
Possible summer vacation projects are:
* a software
component that takes information obtained by a simple vision system and gesture
recognition system (provided by Prof R Jarvis from Engineering), and combines it
with the output of the language interpretation component.
* a speech recognition server that takes spoken input in
real time and interacts with the rest of the language interpretation module (at
present speech is being recorded off line). This server could be combined with a
web-interface under development which shows
the robot in a virtual
environment.
The student would have to be a competent programmer, and have solid mathematical skills.
Interested students should contact Dr Gideon Kowadlo or
Dr Patrick Ye
gkowadlo@gmail.com
ye.patrick@gmail.com
Supervisors: Ingrid Zukerman and Adrian Bickerstaffe
In this project, we apply statistical techniques to determine the overall sentiment and specific ratings in review articles (e.g., film or product reviews). One post-doctoral fellow and one PhD student are currently working on different aspects of this problem.
The summer vacation student would study the effect of collapsing similar words and phrases on the accuracy of the algorithms being investigated, e.g., ``the movie was bad'', ``the film was bad'', ``the film leaves something to be desired''.
The student would have to be a competent programmer, and have solid mathematical skills.
Interested students should contact Dr Adrian
Bickerstaffe:
Adrian.Bickerstaffe@infotech.monash.edu.au
Supervisors: Ingrid Zukerman, David Albrecht, Geoff Webb, Fabian Bohnert and Patrick Ye
This project is linked to the following project, and
could be done as a follow-up of this project:
A simulation investigation of sensors that
could be used to assist Museum visitors.
In this project, we apply statistical techniques to
infer visitors' trajectory and interests in a museum. The aim is to make
recommendations for items to be visited, and generate personalized summaries of
a person's visit. One post-doctoral fellow
and two PhD students are currently
working on different aspects of this project.
The summer vacation student would put together a demo-able museum recommender prototype (hardware + software, possibly partly mock-up), with the objectives of (1) pulling together and integrating all the working pieces of code from the various angles of the KUBADJI project on the back-end, and (2) developing a neat, user-friendly front-end.
Interested students should contact Mr Fabian Bohnert or
Dr Patrick Ye
fabian.bohnert@infotech.monash.edu.au
ye.patrick@gmail.com
Supervisor: Geoff Webb
With the massive growth of data storage, there is strong demand for techniques for extracting information from data. This project will implement advanced data mining software and apply that software to complex problems. The exact problems to be tackled will depend on the background and interests of the successful scholar.
For further details please contact Prof Geoff Webb, webb@infotech.monash.edu.au