Air Operations Defence Research Summer Vacation Scholarships

Here are the Air Operations projects for Australian Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) Scholarships. DSTO is offering 68 university students $4,050 tax-free each for a 12-week research project in the Summer Vacation Scholarship Program. Applications can be made online and close 19 July 2009, with the projects running from late November 2009 to mid February 2010 accross Australia.

The Projects

AOD 06 Helicopter rotor wake modelling to understand complex flow conditions associated with Brownout and Ground Effect operations

Brownout is a challenging operational problem and currently there are no effective solutions. Proposed mitigation techniques include: (i) new control systems (ii) new landing procedures (iii) prepared landing pads and (iv) sensors that can see through the dust.

All these will require a good understanding/modelling of the flow field in the vicinity of the helicopter. Proposed research activity is to model the vorticity in the rotor wake and calculate the resulting flow field

Build a simulation model to capture vorticity of the rotor wake and calculate the resulting flow field.

Engineering students - Aerospace / Mechanical

The successful student will need to have good to excellent programming skills, using either MATLAB / C / C++. They will also require a good understanding of fluid mechanics and fluid flows that include vorticity components

Students must be willing to work independently under supervision, as well as with others in the group. Students must have completed their third year of fulltime study (or part-time equivalent) prior to commencement

Air Operations Division DSTO Fishermans Bend

AOD 07 Attentional and memory limitations in the perception of visual displays

Visual displays are ubiquitous in defence. They are used to convey mission critical information to a wide range of defence personnel in air, land, and sea operations. To deliver maximum benefits, in terms of effectiveness and safety, visual displays need to be optimised to the operators’ perceptual and cognitive abilities. This project aims to investigate how bottlenecks in attention and memory affect our ability to perceive changes like those represented in typical military displays.

Assist in the development of vision experiments (may include some programming), administer experimental protocols to themselves and others, conduct literature searches, analyse experimental data, and write a brief report

Psychology or other human factors related discipline

Must have a sound understanding of research design and statistical analysis for behavioural science. Programming experience desirable, but not required.

Must have a keen desire to learn, engage in laboratory work, and develop a deeper appreciation for human perception and cognition

Air Operations Division DSTO Fishermans Bend

AOD 08 Visual database enhancement artwork

The Air Operations Simulation Centre has recently increased the capability of its visual simulation systems. This requires new and enhanced visual databases to fully utilise the new systems capabilities. An artist with computer skills is required to develop complex scenes/3D models and determine scene rendering limitations of the new systems.

Development of artworks and evaluation of system capacity, determination of system artwork guidelines.

Fine Arts and computer systems Computer programming. Presentation of an artworks portfolio and understanding of computer systems

Air Operations Division DSTO Fishermans Bend

AOD 09 Deep packet inspection firewall

Application layer firewalls are now seen as essential because of the difficulty in assuring that endpoint applications cannot be hijacked. Hence, the verification should be done by a device of standardized configuration whose software has been extensively validated and which is hardened against attacks; additionally, once an attack vector is discovered, it can be patched in a single place.

The goal of this project is to develop algorithms for the inspection and filtering of a number of protocols with real-time processing requirements, such as Voice-over-IP, video conferencing and IEEE DIS 1278.1A. These algorithms will inspect the application layer data to determine if certain fields are in violation of what is expected/allowed, causing the packet to be dropped. Depending on the student’s areas of interest and expertise the implementation could be in C/C++ (running in a real-time scheduler under Linux), FPGA hardware programmed in VHDL with a soft-core coprocessor (e.g. www.netfpga.org) or in a higher level language more amenable to formal verification (e.g. Haskell/Erlang/OCaml or CompCert C). Students interested in information theory and channel coding (i.e. statistics of f faculty, whereby a more tailored research project may be developed

Software development of network filtering and simulation code Elec Eng / Comp. Sci / Maths TCP/IP sockets API under Linux, C programming. Optional: VHDL or Haskell. Strong aptitude/results in either: C programming, VHDL design or mathematics.

Air Operations Division DSTO Fishermans Bend

AOD 10 FUSE interface to distributed cache over Infiniband

In clusters of commodity computers each node only has fast access to a small amount of memory (e.g. 8GB) even though the whole cluster has large memory (e.g. 256GB for 32 nodes). Use of high bandwidth low-latency interconnects such as Infiniband can make accessing memory on remote nodes fast, but it is complex to use it effectively from pre-existing applications. Also, finding if the required data is available in the memory of a remote node can be complex. As a consequence, the same data is often loaded from a central fileserver by many nodes, putting excessive load on the storage system and causing delay.

This project is to implement a FUSE (File System in User Space) plug-in which maintains a collection of data items backed by ram/disk on machines in the cluster. When a request is made for an item not held in local RAM, it should be fetched via the network (either TCP/IP or Infiniband) from one of the nodes with the file. This is very like memcached or Bittorrent.

Software development of network caching code Comp. Sci / Maths Linux development experience, OS kernel understanding, TCP/IP sockets API under Linux, C/C++ programming

Air Operations Division DSTO Fishermans Bend

AOD 11 Data Distribution Service Software Application

DSTO is undertaking research in the application of Data Distribution Service (DDS) technology to network centric systems utilised in Defence. DDS provides a highly configurable software middleware environment whereby systems exchange data by publishing and subscribing to information topics with defined quality of service. This project will produce a graphical utility to demonstrate the capabilities of DDS in the context of tactical mission systems.

Development of a graphical utility for managing participants in a DDS based network. Development of applications that will publish and/or subscribe to given topics with configurable DDS parameters. Negotiating and documenting the agreed requirements, design, implementation and usage of the developed applications. Presentation to colleagues at DSTO at the conclusion of the project. Computer Systems Engineering Software Engineering Computer Science High level of competency in Java programming Additional competency with C++ programming would be highly regarded Familiarity with distributed computing technology would be an advantage

Air Operations Division DSTO Edinburgh (SA)