Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad (MURPA) - International Research Internships at the University of Queensland and Monash University

In today's educational arena, universities must provide students with opportunities to work and study abroad to prepare them for global citizenship and professional competence in a multi-cultural workplace. Numerous reports have challenged universities to develop educational programs that provide an integrated academic basis for developing students' cultural/global competencies.

Since 2008, 42 Monash University students have travelled to international partners under the Monash Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad program (MURPA). They are selected for the program the year prior to their research internships, hence, those chosen in 2015 travelled in 2016, etc. They have travelled to the University of California, San Diego, the National Center for Supercomputing Research in Illinois, The Technion in Israel, the Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R) in Singapore and the University of Warwick. Students are placed for a period of 8 weeks, allowing them to integrate into the research groups as team members. Students have a local mentor in Australia as well as one in the remote site, and often bridge international research projects.

To date, UC San Diego has hosted 30 MURPA students:

2016
William Donohoe
Mentor: Dr. Winston Armstrong
Project Title: Microgrid security and automated assessment
Tyson Ray Jones
Mentor: Professor Frank Wuerthwein
Project Title: Condorflux; modern metric collection
Lachlan Smith
Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze
Project Title: PlayStation Move on Windows
Lucina Togno
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: Workflow task modelling and scheduling
2015
Hayden Razzell
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: Scientific Workflows for Bioinformatics
Troy Smith
Mentor: Dr. Yifeng Cui
Project Title: Earthquake Modelling
2014
Jie Liu
Mentor: Dr. Mark Miller
Project Title: CIPRES Gateway Usage Analysis
James Macindoe
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: WiFire Android App
Jonathan Samosir
Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak
Project Title: A real time data stream processing system for enabling patient tailored healthcare
Brian Song
Mentor: Dr. Andrea Chiba
Project Title: Computation Time Scales in iRat-Rat Social Interactions
2013
Rui Jie Chow
Mentor: Dr. Robert Sinkovits
Project Title: Extending GSOM to the Gordon Supercomputer
Jared Griffiths
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: Performing MapReduce tasks in Kepler using Nimrod/K
Tim Telfer
Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak
Project Title: Automating the Deployment and Management of Software Stacks For Ad-Hoc Wireless Sensor Network Devices
2012
John Bell
Mentor: Professor Philip Bourne
Project Title: Increasing utility of and awareness in SciVee
Satvik Kumar
Mentor: Dr. Robert Sinkovits
Project Title: Extending GSOM to HPC systems
Thomas Moore
Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak
Project Title: An automated approach for the systems definition of ad hoc wireless sensor networks
Minh Ngoc Nhat Huynh
Mentor: Dr. Philip Papadopoulos
Project Title: Approaches to author Rocks virtual machine in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud
2011
Wai Keung Yiu Man Lung
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: Binding ITK with Kepler for Medical Workflow Imaging
Geoff Pascoe
Mentor: Dr. Sameer Tilak
Project Title: Cross Network Platform for Environmental Sensor Data Capture and Analysis
Lin Wei
Mentor: Dr. Wilfred Li
Project Title: Integrating Web Services, Nimrod and Kepler in Biomedical Workflows
James Wetter
Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze
Project Title: Real Time Visualisation in Astrophysics
2010
Jonathan McClure
Mentor: Professor Mike Norman
Project Title: Project Title: Data Mining Galaxies for Bullet Clusters
Ben Morgan
Mentor: Professor Andrew McCulloch
Project Title: Visualization of Tensor Data in Cardiac Models
Aisa Na'Im
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: Data Quality Monitor for Scientific Workflows
Andrew Paterson
Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze
Project Title: Interactively Viewing Density Fields
2009
Nicholas Barnes
Mentors: Professors Andrew McCulloch and Roy Kerckhoffs
Project Title: HPC Performance Improvement in Cardiac Modelling
Li Guanghua (Aimee)
Mentor: Dr. Wilfred Li
Project Title: Avian Flu Drug Discovery
Hoang Nguyen
Mentor: Dr. Ilkay Altintas
Project Title: Interfacing Kepler Scientific Workflows and Optiportals
Peter Serwylo
Mentor: Dr. Jurgen Schulze
Project Title: Spatial Visualisation for Urban Modelling

MURPA and QURPA involve an advanced seminar scheme, in which students can attend virtual seminars given by world leading experts before they leave. These seminars also allow students to "meet" potential UCSD mentors and get some information about potential projects. In 2016 the seminar series focused on an all female cast of presenters. At the time of writing this report, six students have been selected at Monash for the upcoming MURPA 2016/2017 round, and two UQ students are yet to be chosen.

Seminars were sourced from UCSD, Intel, University of Delaware, the University of Notre Dame, the University of Southern California, the University of Chicago, the University of Colorado Boulder, Brown University, the University of Tennessee, the University of Utah, SDSC. As done in the past, seminars were broadcast simultaneously to Monash (in Melbourne) and UQ (in Brisbane), with audiences able to ask questions from either venue. The seminar infrastructure supports a wide range of video conference technologies (both open source and commercial), and is displayed on a 20 MPixel OptiPortal.


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