Honours Scholarship Recipients
Our congratulations to the following people who have been awarded an Honours Scholarship.
Australian National University - Ben Swift
La Trobe University - Kavinda Jayasinghe
University of Adelaide - Sam Pohlenz
University of New South Wales - Jonathan Sokolowski
University of New South Wales - Myung-Hee Kim
University of Queensland - Alex Mellor
University of Sydney - Sheryl Soo
University of Sydney - Kimberley Upton
Each recipient will receive $4000, paid in two even amounts midway through each semester.
Details of their Honours Projects are below:
Australian National University - Ben Swift
Adaptive EEG Sonification Based on Gamma-Band Neural Synchronisation
My honours project is to build a musical instrument which is directly controlled by the neural activity of a participating 'biomusician'. I am interested in musical creativity in the brain and particularly in finding new outlets for this creativity, outside more conventional instruments such as guitar and piano.
La Trobe University - Kavinda Jayasinghe
Judgements of length and size of simple lines and complex shapes.
A great deal of what we perceive in the real world is illusory, and can give rise to accidents and inappropriate responses to conflicting stimuli. Thus, an increased understanding of illusory phenomena could lead to avoidance of these errors, and a greater understanding of the nature of our physical experience of reality. The project will examine the psychophysical perception of length and size by human observers for simple lines, acute, right and obtuse angles, and circles. This will involve a series of psychophysical experiments using a custom-written software program to record judgments of length and size by observers in a variety of stimulus figures.
University of Adelaide - Sam Pohlenz
Development of Context-Aware Web Services
The area of research for my 2007 Honours project is the Development of Context-Aware Web Services. Previous research (in particular that of my supervisor) has explored how the notion of traditional Web services can be extended by incorporating 'context' information - that is, data that can be used by the Web service to adapt itself in order to give more intelligent and more personalized results. My honours project will focus on building a toolset that can be used to develop these context-aware services so that they can then be deployed into a working environment.
University of New South Wales - Jonathan Sokolowski
Darbat Resource Management
My thesis will be focused on Darbat which is a para-virtualised version of Mac OS X's kernel, Darwin. Darbat runs on top of the L4 microkernel and in it's current state, it is capable of running several instances of Darwin concurrently on the same L4 kernel. However when virtualising an operating system, getting it working is only half the story. My research will involve examining static policies such as partitioning as well as dynamic techniques for scheduling and virtual memory management. An analysis of the trade-offs involved between performance and security will be also required. Furthermore, this project may also involve building a user interface for runtime management of resources.
University of New South Wales - Myung-Hee Kim
Concurrent Programming analysis for safety and high performance.
In my project, I would like to use ‘Xgrid’ apple technology which can handle multi tasks in parallel and brings high performance. I need to run several simulations for multi-threaded programming with high contention. Since Xgrid is easy to use and focusing on parallel computing, I am convinced that it will help my project.
University of Queensland - Alex Mellor
SwarmPS Particle Selection Framework
Current methods in structural biology involve gathering individual images of particles from many orientations. With enough of these images (currently between 30 – 100 thousand projections) current tools can resolve the 3 dimensional structures to near atomic resolution. The collecting of large numbers of images of individual particles has traditionally required a significant amount of time and effort. From the original method of manually selecting particles, with could take many weeks, many software packages have been developed to use simple filters (commonly cross correlation or template matching) to speed up the particle selection process. These packages often require an underlying knowledge of the filters and particle detection methods being used, rely heavily on other software tools for functionality, and often have a limited and rigid domain of data.
University of Sydney - Sheryl Soo
The Design and Evaluation of Persuasive Technology for Motivating Environmentally Responsible Behaviour
The aim of this research project to design, develop and evaluate a persuasive display for motivating environmentally responsible attitude and behaviour change in individuals within a large community setting. The project will visualise real-time energy and water consumption data through a persuasive display located within the foyer area of three different buildings on the University of Sydney Camperdown/Darlington Campus.
University of Sydney - Kimberley Upton
Supporting CSCL with Wiki Text Analysis and Visualisations of Team Work Activity
My thesis is about supporting small groups that are collaborative over a period of time and use online tools capable of encapsulating large amounts of data about the activity of the group, including a wiki. For my project I will be analysing a relevant scenario where third year computer science students undertake their capstone Software Development Project unit.
