Associate ProfessorMahendra Piraveenan

Project Opportunities

Title: JANA: a Java- based mixing pattern analyser for complex networks.

Summary of opportunity:

Many distributed systems in the real world, including social, biological and technical systems can be modelled as complex networks. During the past few years a number of new graph theoretic measures have been proposed to analyze complex networks  and the mixing patterns occurring in these networks. Some of these measures have been developed by researchers from the University of Sydney. It therefore becomes necessary to implement these analytical measures in an easily accessible open source Java library so that the wider research community would benefit from it.

Opportunity synopsis:

The student will work with some existing source code developed in java, and will have to implement other measures from scratch. The student will also work on suitable GUIs to give the library a front end, and document source code. While based on research, the project will also reflect a real world software project in the sense that previous work would have to be developed upon, and the robustness, portability, testability and re-usability of the code modules are important.

Suitable for an honours, Masters or vacation student, and the scope could be varied depending on the circumstances.

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Project Opportunities

Title: Beyond Deep Blue:  A complex network approach to playing chess

Summary of opportunity:

If you play chess, you may have noticed that often we have to calculate the net pressure on certain pieces (i.e how many pieces are 'attacking' it and how many pieces are defending it) while playing chess. Could it be that a player who maintains a solid 'defense network', and develops a good 'attack network' has a better chance of winning? Could the evolution of these networks give some indications which can be used to recognize the better player and predict the outcome of a chess game? This project will address these questions.

Opportunity synopsis:

The project will involve developing software that can translate chess notations into a complex network and use standard and innovative networks metrics to calculate network robustness in terms of chess. The students will then develop, implement and test prediction algorithms based on these networks, The project will involve considerable amount of software development from scratch and application of AI techniques.

Suitable for an honours, Masters or vacation student, and the scope could be varied depending on the circumstances.