Research into the swarm behaviours of robots, how sound waves exert force on objects and how a bird’s wingtip feathers contribute to its flying ability are among six UNSW Canberra projects awarded more than $2.8 million in Australian Research Council (ARC) funding.
Eleven academics from UNSW Canberra Engineering and IT were awarded funding from the ARC Discovery Projects on Wednesday.
In total, 72 UNSW projects received $30.8 million in the ARC Discovery Project scheme announced by Minister for Education Dan Tehan.
Professor Nicholas Fisk, Deputy Vice Chancellor (Research), congratulated the University’s researchers on their funding success.
The Discovery Projects scheme provides funding for research projects that can be undertaken by individual researchers or research teams.
The objectives of the scheme include: supporting excellent basic and applied research by individuals and teams; encouraging high-quality research; enhancing international collaborations in research and expanding Australia’s knowledge base and research capabilities.
UNSW Canberra ARC Discovery Project 2020 Round grant recipients:
$580,000 to Professor Hussein Abbass and Dr Sondoss Elsawah
Transforming data assets into organisational knowledge assets sits in the hands of a few, highly specialised, data scientists. The aim of this research is to design educational instruments to support non-experts to teach artificial intelligence (AI) systems in a similar way to educating human teachers to teach human learners.
$390,000 to Professor Jiankun Hu
Privacy-preserving Biometrics based Authentication and Security. Password based authentication systems cannot verify genuine users. Biometric authentication can address this issue. The intended deliverables will include deep learning based biometric feature extractor, cancellable biometrics and cloud oriented biometrics security protocols.
$373,000 to Associate Professors Kathryn Kasmarik and Matthew Garratt
This project aims to develop algorithms to permit groups of robots to evolve coordinated, collective, swarm behaviours. Groups of robots will be conceptualised as developmental swarm organisms with an initially limited set of behaviours, but equipped with structures and processes to permit them to evolve new behaviours.
$540,000 to Professor Valeri Ougrinovski
The project aims to develop an innovative systems theory and optimisation methods to enhance the design of components for next-generation quantum communication networks. It will advance new theoretical knowledge and efficient algorithms that can be applied to make networks more efficient and less costly.
$400,000 to Dr David Powell
This project aims to investigate how sound waves exert forces on objects, and how these forces can be controlled by artificially engineered structures known as acoustic metamaterials. The project is expected to lead to a new understanding of acoustic radiation forces, and how they can be efficiently manipulated with high resolution.
$535,000 to Dr Fangbao Tian, Associate Professor John Young, Professor Joseph Lai and Dr Sridhar Ravi
This project aims to produce a deeper understanding of the role of wingtip feathers in the remarkable abilities of birds to fly in unsteady and unpredictable aerodynamic environments, and in some cases to do so almost silently.
