UTS School of Computing and Creative Media

Research

Our current research activities are mainly focussed on developing digital education technology tools and Internet-of-Things (IoT) to continuously advance our students teaching-and-learning experience including upgrading our university facilities and services to perpetually become a contemporary and exemplary Smart Campus in the world. We strongly believe that the future of education is digital, with its broad and deep potential application in increasing student’s learning productivity and lecturer’s teaching productivity, and also in improving the equally important quality of campus life.

In addition, we are of the view that whatever technologies that we managed to master and develop in order to enrich our education processes and university campus services may ideally be shared and transferred to the local and rural communities such as the local town council, rural folks, schools, NGOs, etc. This is our way of giving back and to play our part in solving basic human needs and bring joy to people’s lives through the enabling application of digital technologies.

R&D Focus Areas

  • Education Technology
  • Internet-of-Things (IoT) for Smart Campus
  • Enabling Technologies for Urban & Rural Development
  • Cyber Security

There are four focussed but yet broad areas (in terms of the underlying computing technologies) that we are presently pursuing as above. In Education Technology, our interests are in developing Learning Analytics (using Data Science and Artificial Intelligence) and creating authentic learning experiences through the deployment of the latest visualization technologies like Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

Closely intertwined with the realm of Education Technology is our initiative to improve our campus facilities and services with the vision of turning it into a model Smart Campus. The core of this effort is our IoT research activities to improve our student attendance system, space and asset management and reservation system, campus security (both physical and cyber), parking system, indoor location and navigation. State-of-the-art mobile devices like smartphones, smart watches, smart glasses, etc and new IoT wireless technologies like LoRA are the key areas for us to explore and produce innovative solutions to improve campus life and experience. The Smart Campus initiative also serve as the test-bed and playground for our students R&D and innovation activities for them to pilot and evaluate IoT technologies before being scaled up and commercialized to a Smart City environment.

An extension of the above areas is our research initiative to share and deploy digital technologies to provide a better quality of life to the local and rural communities. Education technologies that are proven to provide value to our programmes could be transferred and shared with primary and secondary schools. Some underlying IoT solutions for our Smart Campus can equally be applied to the local town council for their own Smart City efforts too as well as to enable internet connectivity and access to high-quality education to the rural people.

Please contact us if you have interest to pursue your Masters/PhD or seek opportunities to collaborate in the above research fields.