KUCHING – The Centre for Digital Futures of Swinburne Sarawak is offering three Master scholarships for the project ‘Development of a Digital Socio-Economy Platform to Improve Quality of Life and Productivity of Rural Communities in Sarawak’.
The scholarships are open to high-achieving research students interested in analysing, designing, implementing and deploying digital platform solution for healthcare, ecotourism and transportation in rural communities.
The scholarships, two for digital platform development and one for social innovation, are worth RM22,800 each per annum for two years on a full-time basis. Also recruited for the same project are four software or system engineers who will receive monthly salary at market rate. Both scholarships and monthly salary are subject to satisfactory progress and the Centre’s approval.
The project will be supervised by Swinburne Sarawak’s Associate Professor Patrick Then, Director of the Centre for Digital Futures. According to Associate Professor Then, this project is a research-led innovation co-funded by Swinburne Sarawak and the university’s industry partner Sarawak Information Systems Sdn Bhd (SAINS). The teams comprise experts from multiple disciplines ranging from Computing, Engineering, Business to Social Science.
Under the digital platform development project, it targets the problem of securing the Internet-of-Things (IoT) with focus on healthcare domain in rural areas of Sarawak. In Sarawak, the rural communities not only have limited access to healthcare services but data on their health is lacking as well.
To tackle this issue, it is proposed for an IoT based digital healthcare service to be established in the form of different mobile applications. The collected data will be analysed through machine learning and bio-statistical methods to uncover the general health of the community and to possibly predict future health trends and provide consultations for rural community.
The scholarship candidates will need to investigate the potential IoT applications and use homes with connected electronic devices such as sensors and actuators linked to the internet to form a smart sensor network monitoring with several parameters of patients from remote location as their case study. Afterwards, they need to identify how the data are transferred from one location to another with innovative technologies at remote areas to create different mobile applications. Social innovation team will be soliciting ground data and measure the social economic impacts of the IoT applications.
As core requirement of the research project, the candidates need to go for site visit and field study including visiting selected villages in rural areas of Sarawak for data collections and IoT design, implementation, testing and deployment. They will work closely with Faculty of Business and Design, and other industrial partners for all tasks.
For more details, visit www.swinburne.edu.my/research. Interested applicants are to email their CV, cover letter and transcript to Project Leader Associate Professor Patrick Then at pthen@swinburne.edu.my with the email titled ‘Digital Platform Scholarship’ before 12 November 2017. Shortlisted applicants will be called for interview from 21 to 23 November 2017.