A summer to remember: Welcoming our ECS Summer Scholars

Students from the School of Engineering and Computer Science will spend the summer working alongside globally-recognised researchers gaining valuable experience in research through Victoria’s Summer Scholars Scheme.

Students are selected for the Scheme based on their academic results, experience in the research area and recommendations from the staff who propose the research projects.

The projects represent a unique opportunity for external organisations, academics and students to work together in research. This year students will be supporting research projects ranging from surveying recent graduates and validating Fitbits to developing an automated inventory tracker for ambulances and finding ways to use virtual reality to assist in healthcare education.

Professor Neil Dodgson, who will be supervising one of the summer projects, says that the Scheme will take students to new and exciting places.

“Research provides our students an opportunity to apply what they’ve learned as undergraduates to work at the cutting edge of knowledge,” he says.

Students will gain a variety of skills, including practical programming experience, data collection and analysis, writing literature reviews, interviewing techniques, learning to use specialised software, and acquiring specialist skills in the laboratory. But what’s more important, says Professor Dodgson, is learning to take a flexible attitude.

“It is a vital step in growing up to realise that there is more to life than just assimilating knowledge and skills that others have: there are places you can go where things are truly new and unknown.

“The nature of research means that successful Summer Scholars need to be adaptable and ask lots of questions of everyone around them,” says Professor Dodgson. “You never know who is going to provide the nugget of knowledge that helps you crack the problem.”

Victoria University awards up to 115 internally-funded Summer Research scholarships and around 150 externally-funded projects over the summer trimester.

Information about 2018/2019 Summer Scholar applications will be available in 2018.

School of Engineering and Computer Science Summer Scholars 2017/18

Brendan Julian
Survey & Interviews of Recent ECS Graduates
Chelsea Miller
Pilot Contamination in 5G Massive MIMO Systems
Benjamin Evans
Evolutionary Machine Learning and Data Mining
Ryan Curry
Study of Industrial IoT applications and use cases in NZ
Mansour Javaher
QoS-aware Web Service Location Allocation
Tao Shi
QoS-aware Web Service Location Allocation
Kathleen Griffin
Automated training of orchestral conducting
Daniel Forbes
Validating Fitbits
Shaun Swan
Microfluidic testbed for plasmonic sensors
Samuel Devese
Lead-free ferroelectrics for tunable capacitors, acoustic transducers and data storage
Benjamin Selwyn-Smith
Virtual Reality Simulation for Healthcare Education
Jordan MacLachlan
Evolutionary machine learning for dynamic vehicle routing problem
Luke Johnson
Evolutionary Feature Selection and Dimensionality Reduction for Large-Scale Classification
Ching Ke
Physiological signal processing
Ikram Singh
Electrical Standards MSL Software and Measurement Systems
Hamish Gibb
Electrical Standards MSL Software and Measurement Systems
Aran Warren
Developing a Motion Sensor
Julian Schurhammer
An automated ambulance critical inventory tracking and alerting system
Janice Chin
Harmonic Scale Development
Dipenenkumar Patel
Analytics Harbour Development
Jonathan Carr
TrafficVis: Visualizing Network Traffic Resilience
Daniel Braithwaite
Transport Network Resilience Proof of Concept
Li Li
Transport Network Resilience Proof of Concept
James Miller
Real time video stitching for live 360 video VR streaming