|
[Print-friendly version]
Exciting new opportunities for research are available in projects aligned with QUT institutes, Cooperative Research Centres (CRC) and other specialist or cross-disciplinary research groups with whom the faculty actively collaborates.
The Faculty has a range of innovative research themes including:
Business Services
Business Services research aims to support the effective provision of IT-mediated computer services within organisations and includes:
- Business process management and workflow from an integrated organisational and technical perspective
- The impact of information systems on organisational success
- Knowledge management within organisations.
Business Process Management
Business Process Management (BPM) has reached maturity and is seen as a core approach for the alignment of business and IT perspectives. The set of related IT methods and tools has significantly advanced and is now consolidated under the umbrella term ‘Process-aware Information Systems'. Current BPM research topics include:
- Service ecosystems for collaborative process improvement
- Context-aware process modelling
- Rapidly locating items in distribution networks with process-driven nodes
- Yet Another Workflow Language (YAWL).
IT Professional Services
IT Professional Services (ITPS) seek to develop tools and techniques for professionals and managers including data collection instruments and related methodologies. The research accumulates data for comparative analysis and reporting, as well as for ongoing validation and extension of ITPS knowledge-assets.
ITPS projects range from highly focused theory-generation, testing and extension work, addressing fundamental concepts to design science, or iterative developmental work, perhaps employing action research cycles to evolve a novel IT artefact informed by senior managers in industry practice. Current research includes:
- Measuring the impact of IS in organisations: The IS-impact approach
- Knowledge management and subjective logic.
eResearch
eResearch is the use of advanced information and communications technology to enable new kinds of research. It covers three important areas:
- Data and associated processing – researchers are capturing more and more data; this deluge needs to be managed, analysed and visualised.
- Publication – the nature of publication and research is changing through electronic publication. Publications are becoming active and linked to data and experiments.
- Collaboration – there is an increasing need for researchers to collaborate, for example on large multi-disciplinary projects. This requires collaboration over data and publications.
Some of our eResearch areas are:
- Programming Languages and Systems (PLAS).
- Grid and Parallel Computing.
- Visual and Media Computing (VMC).
- Smart Devices.
The Faculty also hosts the Microsoft QUT eResearch Centre which concentrates on accelerating scientific research through the development of smart software tools. These IT tools enable simple and rapid analysis of vast amounts of data which support collaboration between scientists.
Information Science
Information Science explores the way people access and use information and the technologies to support information retrieval appropriate to their needs. Research areas include:
• The cognitive and social aspects of user behaviour in information searching.
• Information literacy and learning.
• Information retrieval of structured and unstructured data including XML and multimedia, using machine learning and data mining.
Informatics
The Informatics research area develops theories and models of informatics and information science, and investigates how information is created, managed and used by individuals, societies, organisations and ICT environments with an emphasis on the information behaviour.
Information Retrieval and Web Intelligence
This research focuses on studying the representation, storage, organisation, access and distillation of information from data. With the explosion of information resources on the web, and with so many organisations housing massive data sources, modern computational intelligence techniques have emerged. These techniques together with search engine and agent based technologies allow the creation of applications that could not have been possible only a few short years ago.
Cognitive Informatics
Cognitive informatics investigates how cognitive models can inform information retrieval and web systems including cognitive issues, user studies and human user interfaces.
Systems Science
The construction of IT systems to meet real-world needs involves a myriad of research challenges. The research in the Systems Science group addresses the challenges posed by:
• The complexity of many real-world situations, e.g. high-accuracy global positioning systems to whole-of-life software engineering.
• Systems that must be highly dependable, for example, electronic health monitoring.
• Systems that must be secured against attack and misuse through governance and technology frameworks and advanced cryptographic techniques.
Global Navigation Satellite Systems
Global Navigation Satellite Systems research focuses on development of advanced techniques to deliver regional and local precise GNSS positioning services in Queensland, supporting surveying and machine automation in mining, agriculture and construction industries.
Wireless Communication
This research focuses on development of wireless communication standards framework and technologies for infrastructure to infrastructure, infrastructure to vehicle, and vehicle to vehicle communications. These standards will provide the basis for a broad range of applications in environment, including vehicle safety, automated tolling, enhanced navigation, traffic management and many others.
e-Health
This research investigates the tools and techniques that help managers of health information systems make more informed decisions resulting in higher quality IT solutions for the e-health sector.
Security and Trust
The Security and Trust research area promotes multidisciplinary research in technology, legal, policy and governance issues related to information security. The Faculty's research in this area includes the following research activities:
- Computer intrusion, forensics and evidence
- Cryptology
- Governance and information protection
- Identity, usability and trust
- Information flow analysis
- Technology, law and policy
- Trusted systems and network security.
|
