Listed on this page are current research projects being offered for the Vacation Scholarship Program.
For more information on this research group see: Operations Research
Floods, fires and explosions: how to design survivable networks in the modern age.
Much of society’s critical infrastructure takes the form of large-scale networks. Think of examples such as the power grid, the NBN, gas and water pipelines, and transportation networks. All such networks are potentially vulnerable to natural disasters, or even terrorist attacks. Significant interruption to these networks can wreak havoc. So the question is: how do we design these networks to be robust against local, regional destruction, without blowing the national budget?
In this project we will use planar geometric graph models for this problem and analyse survivability when the destruction region is modelled as a circular disk. In particular, we would like to find algorithms for optimally designing networks that are survivable against failures of a given maximum radius. The project will use mathematical tools from graph theory, optimisation, computer science and just a little bit of Euclidean geometry.
Contact: Charl Ras cjras@unimelb.edu.au
Fast Second-Order Optimisation for Machine Learning
Optimisation algorithms are at the core of machine learning tasks, but the size of the models and datasets being used mean that simple 'first-order' algorithms are usually used. In this project, we will investigate if blending ideas from first-order and second-order methods can improve training speed for machine learning problems.
Contact: Lindon Roberts lindon.roberts@unimelb.edu.au