Project & industry research scholarships

Externally-funded research projects

Aboriginal History Archive Research Scholarship

The Aboriginal History Archive Research Scholarship are granted to candidates with a strong understanding of the nature of community control to conduct independent and team-based research, which will contribute to the research project - Resetting the Record: Indigenous History, Truth and Justice - funded by the Paul Ramsay Foundation.

Led by Professor Gary Foley, the overarching aim of the project is to unearth Indigenous history, stories, alternative narratives and learnings from the past, to engage communities, present into the public debate, provide materials for curricula, and, most importantly, make submissions to the Yoo-rrook Justice Commission in Victoria.

Participation in this project provides a unique opportunity to contribute to impactful research in Indigenous history, truth and justice.

Eligibility: Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander applicants only for Doctor of Philosophy or Master of Research
For more information please contact: Dr Rochelle Lepper, [email protected]  

Blockchain-Enhanced Federated Learning for Secure Edge Computing

This project aims to address the pressing requirement to secure edge computing applications across diverse sectors such as healthcare, transportation, and manufacturing, which are gaining significance in Australia and worldwide. 

This project expects to generate new knowledge in federated learning by combining blockchain and graph modelling technologies, aligning with national cybersecurity priorities and contributing to a safer digital environment for individuals, businesses, and critical infrastructure. 

Expected outcomes include improved edge computing performance, privacy preservation, and attack resistance for both internal and external threats, benefiting the Australian community and supporting the nation's digital transformation. 

Supervisors: Dr Jiao Yin, Professor Hua Wang 

Eligibility: Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents, and International applicants (PhD only) 

Funded by: Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA) 

For more information: Please refer to the application guide or email [email protected] .

• 2025 application guide (PDF, 309.08 KB)

Differential Evolution Framework for Intelligent Charging Scheduling

Smart charging scheduling is a vital challenge as dynamic environment with traffic networks and various unexpected issues. This project aims to develop a differential evolution framework for intelligent charging scheduling. The framework consists of a comprehensive charging scheduling model with various road networks and factors. 

The project outcomes include a distributed evolutionary computation framework, differential evolution algorithms, and cooperative co-evolutionary strategies. The outcome results will be demonstrated by practical evaluations over public datasets and comparisons to related works. 

The project is beneficial to the nation in both theory of artificial intelligence techniques and applications of real transport systems.

Supervisors: Professor Hua Wang

Eligibility: Open to Australian or New Zealand citizens, Australian permanent residents, and international applicants 

Funded by: Australian Research Council Discovery Project

For more information: Please refer to the application guide or email [email protected] .

• 2025 application guide (PDF, 381.67 KB)

Evolving privacy & utility in data storage & publishing

This project aims to develop a distributed evolutionary computation-based framework to optimise data privacy and utility in distributed database systems. It intends to synchronously solve the conflicting challenges of privacy preservation and utility maintenance in multi-objective, dynamic, and multitasking scenarios. 

Expected outcomes include a new computation framework as a service and freely available distributed computation models, evolutionary algorithms, and knowledge-transfer strategies. 

Anticipated benefits include theoretical contributions to artificial intelligence, cyber security, distributed computation, and a service to eliminate data owners' privacy concerns while guaranteeing the value of data in further utilisation.

Eligibility: This scholarship is for Domestic and International Doctor of Philosophy applicants only

Funded by: Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (ARC DECRA)

For more information please contact: Dr Yongfeng Ge,  [email protected]

Refer to the 2024 Guide to Applicants for further details:

• 2024 application guide (PDF, 299.2 KB)

Personalised Privacy-Preserving Network Data Publishing System

Data sharing has become a driving force for many businesses in industrial sectors. This project aims to develop a privacy preserving network data publishing system that can preserve user privacy in a personalised way while maintaining maximal utility of the published data. 

To make accurate privacy preservation, this project will design novel learning models to derive accurate users’ correlation and their privacy intention, develop efficient privacy preserving algorithms to deal with static and dynamic network data sharing. 

The success of this project will benefit many industries and government agencies to reduce users’ privacy breaches, avoid illegal consequences of sharing data, and enhance these service providers’ service quality.

Refer to the 2024 Guide to Applicants for further details.

• Personalised Privacy-Preserving Network Data Publishing System scholarship application guide (PDF, 802.47 KB)

Industry-supported scholarships