Below are the details of the individual projects:

Title: ACCORD: Chemotherapy module
Summer Intern: David Kwong
Supervisor(s): Alan Lo
Discipline: Life Science
Research Objective: The aim of the project is to continue extending the functionalities of ACCORD (Australian Comprehensive Cancer Outcomes and Research Database). This involves creating GUI front-end to allow users such as clinicians, medical practitioners and researchers to input data and having ACCORD store them in a central database. The front-end will provide users with the ability to search, query and retrieve data from the database.

The extension is to add a chemotherapy prescription module to the existing ACCORD framework. This module is intended for doctors and oncologists at clinical sites such as hospitals to use. It will allow them to prescribe chemotherapy medications to their patients. By allowing doctors to prescribe via the system, the amount of paperwork can be reduced. In addition, research related data can be obtained from the prescription automatically. This is done internally by the system. With this automation, there is no longer the need for data entry officers to manually transfer the research data from paper based forms into the system. Hence, dirty data as a result of misinterpretation of doctors' handwritings will not occur. In addition, delays due to uncertainties as to what the doctor has prescribed on the forms can be avoided too.

Final Report: ACCORD: Chemotherapy Module

Title: Wild Fire Risk Assessment
Summer Intern: Angus MacAulay and Michelle Zhang
Supervisor(s): Marcus Reston
Discipline: Life Science
Research Objective: In order to improve planning and management of fire-fighting efforts as well as fire recovery activities, the OESC is attempting to introduce a standard classification of “assets” (including economic, social and environmental classes), a set of spatial data, and a risk model. The introduction of this standard model will allow improved collaboration between fire-fighting stakeholders at a state-wide level through to a local level. The Wildfire Risk Assessment Mapping project will allow local users to modify values associated with the spatial data, in order to reflect local knowledge. For example a road may be assigned a low value and be classified as such, but knowing that it is the only road between two towns it may be reclassified to reflect its true value.

Final Report: Wild Fire Risk Assessment Mapping

Title: World Vision Mapping System
Summer Intern: Alwyn Davidson
Supervisor(s): Marcus Reston
Discipline: Life Science
Research Objective: Addressing the issue of project management across the areas of aid relief and sustainable development, lead to an investigation of implementing possible geospatial applications for World Vision Australia. The need to accurately locate project offices around the globe, access current project statistics and documents, and to fully utilize thematically represented state-wide statistical data, were seen as the three main aspects which can be improved with the implementation of a reliable geospatial application. Cartographic services hold a long history with strategic planning, however the use of GIS (Geographic Information Systems) is relatively new in this field of application, especially for non-profit aid organisations.

Thorough investigation lead to a prototype of an interactive web-based mapping application based on World Vision Australia projects and country of Nicaragua. The application focused on open source products centering around an internal web interface. Currently, mapping practices in World Vision Australia (WVA) is limited to JPEG images from various sources presented in a word file, containing information in text boxes pointing to the area of the project of interest. This is a very limited and static form of visual representation, for it lacks spatial accuracy and is updated rarely.

WVA work internationally and currently has six projects in Nicaragua, all of which aim to improve standards of living and reduce poverty through sustainable development projects based on health, education and social welfare. Having the ability to visualise the locations of such projects in relation to one another, and to relate meaningful statistics with current project information, will not only improve project management but will also have the capacity to improve the users knowledge of the geography and spatial relationships of project locations. These advantages provide the main motivation for such a project, which are further emphasised by the lack of such applications in non-government organisations throughout Australia.

Final Report: World Vision Mapping System (To come)

Title: A grid-based fluent portal
Summer Intern: Carlos Alexandre Queiroz
Supervisor(s): Markus Binsteiner
Research Objective: The objective of this project is to build an easily extendable framework and user interface that enables scientists to submit and monitor fluent jobs to the APAC Grid. At the moment it is very complicated for scientists to submit jobs to the APAC Grid. Mostly the don't use the grid infrastructure at all but submit their jobs via an ssh terminal on the command-line. A lot of the scientists are used to Graphical User Interfaces and don't like/understand the command-line way of executing commands. Another motivation was to deploy an easily extendable framework that not only supports the fluent application but all kinds of applications. This should be possible in a way that grid developers don't have to spend much time in adding new applications to the framework. Within the APAC Grid there is a lot of work going in developing web portals, which are able to help users submit and monitor jobs. This is done mostly using the Gridsphere portlet container. Every new developer has to understand many technologies (J2EE, Portlets, hibernate, globus, etc) to be able to develop a new web portal. We wanted to test whether it is possible to provide an easy to use base framework and an (fluent) example implementation for submitting and monitoring grid jobs.

Final Report: A Grid Based Fluent Portal

Title: e Parallel Cellular Automata Framework
Summer Intern: Andrew Magee
Supervisor(s): Patrick Sunter
Discipline: Computational Software Development
Research Objective:vThe aim of the Parallel Cellular Automata Framework project was to implement a parallel system to simulate the processes of recrystallisation and grain growth of a material under deformation, and then to factor the system produced into a system for handling cellular automata in general. The client was Nima Yazdipour from Deakin University, Geelong. The system was implemented as a StGermain^?-based object-oriented application.

Final Report: Parallel Cellular Automata Modelling Framework

Title: e St Germain to IEE data server
Summer Intern: Ewan Willis
Supervisor(s): Steve Quenette
Discipline: Computational Software Development
Research Objective: Prior to project inception is has only been possible to visualise St Germain computational data using gLucifer. The data server and St Germain plugin that are resultant from this project allow checkpointed St Germain data to be queried remotely. Ultimately the data served will be visualised in IEE.

Final Report: St Germain to IEE

Title: Advanced boundary capabilities for StGermain to Underworld
Summer Intern: Chris Marchingo
Supervisor(s): Luke Hodkinson
Discipline: Computational Software Development
Research Objective: The StGermain^? finite element method solver currently lacked capability to consider force boundary conditions imposed on a domain, specifically when solving Stokes flow equations. The aim of this project is to add the required functionality to the code so that it can accomplish this, allowing for a more realistic modelling that takes external stresses into account. The StGermain^? code needs to be modified so that it can correctly model a specific situation outlined by Louis Moresi of Monash University; however this will also mean the implementation of a far more general enhancement that can be used for further simulations in the future.

Final Report: Advanced Boundary Capabilities for StGermain-to-Underworld

Title: Develop a MDO Workflow Client
Summer Intern: Dilshan Angampitiya
Supervisor(s): David Colls
Discipline: Computational Prototyping
Research Objective: The aim is to build software for viewing and editing workflow and dataflow descriptions that has an XUL (XML UI Language) front-end. The description of a workflow and dataflow must also be captured in an XML file format. The software will be independent from the actual execution of the workflow which is outside the scope of the project. VPAC has identified an industry need for a low-cost and simple but flexible workflow client. This project also explored the feasibility of XUL (XML UI Language) and Mozilla as an application development framework.

MDO is a computational technique that is used to find the best design of engineered products, under a given set of design variations, underlying constraints and product performance measures. For example, MDO may be used by the manufacturers of an aircraft body, who wish to ensure sufficient structural strength while minimizing mass, as additional mass increases costs and reduces range. MDO typically integrates multiple steps of design adjustment, model construction, computational performance analysis, results extraction and data compilation; hence the ability to design automated workflows is essential to MDO.

Final Report: Develop a MDO Workflow Client

Title: Shader Algorithm in Virtools for crash and modal data sets
Summer Intern: Kaiwei Sun S
Supervisor(s): Greg Watson
Discipline: Computational Prototyping
Research Objective: The objective of this project is to explore the concept of animating and visualizing a range of engineering data using the Graphic Processing Unit (GPU). What is expected at the end of the project is to be able to carry out a whole 3D animation based on the GPU with the minimum interventions from the Central Processing Unit (CPU), thus producing significantly improved visualisation performance. The result of LS-DYNA crash simulation, which is the focus of the project, is currently animated and displayed in the industry using the tool called LS-PREPOST. However, there is a limitation to which LS-PREPOST can achieve as it copies the frames of animations from system memory to video memory before the animation can be displayed onto the screen. Consequently, this continuous copying process during runtime could potentially become a bottleneck.

This project is an experimental alternative to LS-PREPOST, which aims to load the whole dataset (possibly compressed) into graphics memory from the start, and carry out the entire vertex interpolation process within the graphics card. This approach, which avoids the memory copying process during runtime, opens up the opportunity for higher performance. If the outcome is successful, this new approach will possibly enable the displaying of multiple runs of crash simulations without apparent delays.

Final Report: Shader Algorithm in Virtools for crash and modal data sets

Title: AR with Tracking
Summer Intern: John Hudson
Supervisor(s): Mark Baily
Discipline: Computational Prototyping
Research Objective: The aim of this project is to research, develop and demonstrate Augmented Reality (AR) technology. AR technology will be demonstrated by an interactive guided tour with a setup guide for the Engineering Visualisations Laboratory (EV Lab). The tour will be shown on a tablet PC, with a web camera and a 6DOF tracking device attached to the tablet PC. The tour will introduce the user to some of the features, facilities and objects in the EV Lab by superimposing information windows onto the video feed from the webcam. It will provide basic setup information for using the EV Lab such as how to use the projectors, how to connect a laptop etc. The tour will also allow the user to interact with superimposed virtual objects in the room.

Final Report: AR with Tracking

Title: Integration of Access Grid functionality into IEE
Summer Intern: Sam Gundry
Supervisor(s): Chris Seeling
Discipline: Computational Prototyping
Research Objective: The Access Grid (AG) is a worldwide internet based resource, spread over 56 countries, supporting distributed interaction between 'virtual venues' and allows communication through video, audio, text and shared applications and services, including shared presentation viewing, shared web browsing and shared data storage. It differs from conventional conference tools in its ability for large-scale meetings, focusing on groups instead of individuals. Our project aims to integrate AG's functionality into the Information Engagement Environment (IEE) and Visual Interactive Development Environment (VIDE).

We plan to investigate integration of video, audio and instant text messaging into VIDE to increase the interactivity of visualised engineering design.

Final Report: was not required for this project.