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Summer Student Scholarships

Each year we offer a number of placements within the Centre to outstanding undergraduate applicants. The students work alongside the Centre's research staff on their own research project, as well as being introduced to the breadth of Centre activities. Depending on the project, students get the chance to experience the internal and external collaborative research projects with industry and research partners.

The Scholarships will run from December 2008 to Februaury 2009 (10 weeks, start and finish dates to be finalised) with the student funded $400 per week..

Application and Eligibility:

Appplications should be submitted to the Centre Administrator, by November 14, 2008 .
Applications should include, CV with course transcript, and statement of preferred topic.
Eligible students would be undergraduates from Swinburne (or other Australian Universities) with an average mark of 80 or more from previous years, and who intend to continue study in the year following the project period.

Please note - students are also encouraged to submit their own project ideas.

 

Project List:

 

Project Descriptions:

Developing the ROADmaker graphical programming tool

Description: The ROADmaker Eclipse plugin tool will support the development of 'organisational' software structures based on the ROAD (Role-oriented Adaptive Design) framework. ROADmaker will allow the programmer to graphically create role models, from which Java code is then automatically generated. The successful applicant will have good Java skills, and knowledge of UML and the Eclipse framework. Familiarity with Eclipse plugin development and database design would also be nice, but is not essential.

Supervisors: Dr Alan Colman and Prof Jun Han

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Automated Guidance for Web Service Composition

Description: Developing software applications by composing Web services is a new computing paradigm. This project will aims to develop an automated tool that provides guidance for application developer in composing Web services by utilising business rules governing the target application/domain. A preliminary tool already exists. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to learn this new area and tool and further enhance the tool with new capabilities. Good programming knowledge in Java and web-related technologies is required.

Supervisors: Prof Jun Han and Dr Yan Jin

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WS-BPEL based Collaborative Business Process Modelling System

Description: This project aims to incorporate the organisation-oriented modelling perspective into SAP business process management softwares, and thereby enhances the flexibility of business process modelling. The work is based on the ARC Linkage project – “An Organisational-Relative Framework for Collaborative Business Processes”, with SAP Research as the industry partner.
Tasks:
1. Develop an agreement management component.
This component is responsible to store and sort the agreements or contracts established for business collaboration. These agreements may be stored in data tables of a database system.

2. Develop a business process directory service.
This service is responsible for registering the business processes published by process modellers. Thereby, other organisations may discover and reuse these business processes for synergy. Each organisation may view all available business processes published by all organisations with a Web based interface, yet its view are subject to the restrictions defined in proper contracts. This work can be done by extending the SAP Nehemiah engine.

3. Extend the Maestro modelling tool.
Maestro is a Java-based graphical tool for modelling business processes in WS-BPEL language, from SAP. As we have already extended WS-BPEL language to reflect our organisation-oriented modelling perspective, necessary extensions are required to enable Maestro to handle the business processes written in the extended WS-BPEL language. Thereby, uses can publish or download business processes to or from the business process directory service, and assemble proper partner business processes together with local business processes into a collaborative business process.

Pre-requisites:
Web Development (JSP programming), Java Programming, XML Technologies, Internet Technologies, and Database System
Preferable:
BPEL Language (optional), Process modelling (optional)
Skills in using Maestro and Nehemiah.

Supervisor: Assoc Prof Chengfei Liu and Xiaohui Zhao

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Development of SwinDeW-G: a p2p-based grid workflow system


Description: Grid workflow systems can be deployed to computation and transaction intensive e-science and e-business applications. This project focuses on development of a peer-to-peer based grid workflow system called SwinDeW-G which is the extension of the existing SwinDeW prototype. It involves facilitation of the Java environment, p2p platform (JXTA) and grid infrastructure (Globus Toolkit).

Supervisor: Prof Yun Yang and Dr Jinjun Chen

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Development of SwinDeW-V: a grid workflow verification system for temporal constraints


Description: Grid workflow systems can be deployed to computation and transaction intensive e-science and e-business applications. However, to guarantee the execution correctness in terms of time, temporal constraints need to be set and adjusted in order to have the checkpoints selected for verification. This project focuses on building up some test-beds for a grid workflow verification system, called SwinDeW-V, for a large amount of temporal constraints.

Supervisor: Prof Yun Yang and Dr Jinjun Chen

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Development of SwinDeW-A: p2p based workflow coordination supported by service level agreement management

Description: Description: Peer-to-peer based workflow systems can be deployed to various process applications. This project focuses on research into SLA management and its role in agent-based workflow coordination.

Supervisor: Prof Yun Yang and Prof Ryszard Kowalczyk

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Intelligent Agents in SecondLife


Description: The project aims at enabling intelligent agents to participate in SecondLife in a similar fashion as human users. It will involve the prototypical integration of Intelligent Agents Environment (JADE) with the SecondLife, and the development of a proof-of-concept application demonstrating new functionalities including automation of the avatars and interaction between human users and intelligent avatars.

Supervisor: Prof Ryszard Kowalczyk 

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OpenSocial demonstrator 

Description: The Agent-Enabled Social Network (AESN) project develops a new P2P platform called OpeSocial that uses agents to automate and manage social networks which can scale up massively for interconnecting individuals, organizations and groups. This vacation project involves the implementation of a 3D user interface based on i3D technology for the use case as a proof-of-concept to demonstrate and evaluate the capabilities of the proposed framework.

Supervisor: Prof Ryszard Kowalczyk

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Social Messaging

Description:Everyday Interactive Networks (EIN) has developed an interactive 3D virtual world community, VastPark (www.vastpark.com). They are looking at providing its users with a social environment that the user can configure for automation and management. A team from the Research Program for Intelligent and Multi-Agent Systems (IAMAS) is providing the OpenSocial platform for this social environment.
The aim of the SocialMessaging project is to build an installable Windows messaging client using the OpenSocial platform that can be plugin to VastPark. The project is to be developed in Microsoft .NET for use in VastPark; and it is envisioned that SocialMessaging is pluggable into any online community, thus enabling users from different communities to message each other since they share a common social environment through the OpenSocial platform.
The project involves design, implementation and documentation of the messaging application. The application is to provide users the ability to send different message types (e.g. private mail, public notice, sponsor message, competition, job listing, quotation request) and to organise and browse received messages (e.g. new, read or replied messages, relevance, date, sender or receiver).

Supervisor: Dr Bao Vo and Prof Ryszard Kowalczyk

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BuildingSMART with cooperative information agents.

Description: One key issue in the Architecture, Engineering, Construction and Facility Management (AEC/FM) sector is the lack of interoperability - the ability to share information, from the inception of a project to the phase of asset or facility management. The Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) is a standardized Building Information Model (BIM) based on an ISO standard (ISO, 1994) for sharing and accessing building development data enabling interoperability between heterogenous software applications. Interoperability is defined as the seamless sharing of building data between multiple applications (or disciplines) over any or all life cycle phases of a building development project. However, managing the information flow between different partners is still a rather daunting task. We propose to use cooperative information agents who are capable of negotiating and coordinating to facilitate communication and information exchange between partners. The agents will, when possible, reconcile the conflicts between different information sources and highlight inconsistencies that require the attention from the parties involved. Another objective is to coordinate the activities of different partners allowing them to meet the proposed requirements and timelines.
Activities: One of our aims is to develop an infrastructure to enable data sharing and information exchange between partners using Web services and information agents. A major research issue that will be explored during the design and implementation of the infrastructure is trust and security. We hope to have a prototype system implemented as well as the emerging phenomena identified and possibly addressed.

Supervisor: Dr Bao Vo and Prof Ryszard Kowalczyk

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In-car navigation systems: An application of automated negotiation and web services

Description: This project aims to enhance the capability of in-car navigation systems to dynamically obtain relevant information. When a vehicle enters a territory whose map and other relevant information are not included in the road database of its navigation system, wireless communication can enable the system to obtain the required maps and information by negotiating with the service providers in the region for the relevant web services. Additional information about traffic, road works, etc. obtained by satellites or from helicopter-views that allows computation of the best route to the destination can also be negotiated.
Activities: We will try to implement a prototype system based on the existing agent and web service platform built by our group. Some simulated data can be used to carry out experiments with the system. For preliminary testings, we can abstract GIS-data as graphs whose vertices represent geographical locations and edges represent routes between locations.

Supervisor: Dr Bao Vo and Prof Ryszard Kowalczyk

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Implementing policy support for UDDI

Description: This project is to implement a prototype for supporting policy in UDDI. This includes adding a policy information model to UDDI data structures and extending the UDDI publishing and querying API to support attaching policy-related information. Actual work will involve extending and using Apache Neethi and jUDDI or other relevant opensource product. Good programming in Java and Web Services technology is required. Also, the prototype is preferred to have a web interface so skill in Web programming using Java (servlet/JSP/JSF) is an advantage.

Supervisor: Tan Phan and Jun Han

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Implementing HOPE editor and policy refinement engine

Description: This project is to implement a graphical tool to edit edit business policy and an engine to refine them into WS-Policy. This work will extend one of the existing prototype. Good programming in Java, particularly Swing or C# and a basic understanding of XML schema is required. Understanding of Web Services and Web Services Policy is an advantage.

Supervisor: Tan Phan and Jun Han

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