| Robert Amor's Project Ideas |
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I have listed a variety of areas that I have interests in. As you will gather, the common theme is information (or content) management (often on the Internet). Each of these areas could support projects at very different levels, from fully specified undergraduate projects (e.g., COMPSCI 380 or SOFTENG 401), to postgraduate projects (e.g., COMPSCI 780), Honours theses, through to Masters and Ph.D. theses. Please contact me (trebor@cs.auckland.ac.nz) if any of these ideas interest you, or to explore your interests in related areas.
I have broad interests in almost any ICT project related to Architecture, Engineering and Construction and also Operations areas (AECO). I have been researching in this area since 1985, and spent 5 years at the Building Research Establishment in the UK doing applied research on a wide variety of construction specific projects. The kinds of projects I'd be interested in include:
We are interested in how much of our codes and standards can be automatically checked against a building model (e.g., BIM). New AI and NLP techniques, alongside sophisticated BIM models, have supported a step change in our ability to automate code compliance checking. However, especially with performance-based codes, there are many classes of compliance that we cannot currently check. Approaches to address these difficult areas are still needed. Then there is the need to comprehend and check information provided in tables and figures in the codes.
Game engines provide very efficient 3D visualisation and low bandwidth immersive collaboartion between multiple participants (game players). How can we hijack this technology to do some useful work? With the School of Architecture we have been developing design critique tools for student building designs. With Psychology we have investigated physiological measures within a VR environment to identify risk resilience during training. Often we are looking to VR and AR as the display mode to introduce these environments to users on site. Also looking at gesture-based interactions within the environment.
A large number of applications need to exchange information with other services as part of their service. However, the majority of services structure their information in differing formats (data structures). How can we describe and manage the mapping of this information between the varying structures? There are restricted solutions in RDBMS, XML, and even a developing ISO standard (EXPRESS-X). But no one seems to have defined what the scope of mappings are, and hence have no way of describing what types of mapping are required for different systems. Specific project areas include:
When a range of services are swapping overlapping information we reach a situation where the consistency of the information needs to be maintained. In RDBMS areas a transactional approach is used, but this is very restrictive and doesn't work for applications requiring long transaction cycles (e.g., 1-2 days of design analysis for a portion of a building system). Differing approaches can be developed in this area, and the impact of different approaches calculated for particular types of applications.