Research Priorities

• Population networks - how can we account for local patch dynamics, spatial structure and migration patterns?
• Power networks - how do we diagnose faults in complex and distributed systems?

Researchers

• Chief Investigator: Phil Pollett
• Research Fellow: Ross McVinish
• PhD student : Fionnuala Buckley (Graduated April 2011)
• PhD student : Dejan Jovanovic
• PhD student : Aminath Shausan
• PhD student : Andrew Smith
• MPhil student: Alexander Ridley
• Honours student : Jessica Chan (Graduated December 2011)

Selected Research Projects

• Stochastic Models for Population Networks

  Project leader: Phil Pollett (UQ)
  Researchers: Fionnuala Buckley (UQ), Jessica Chan (UQ), Ross McVinish (UQ), Aminath Shausan (UQ) and Andrew Smith (UQ)

  We are studying populations that occupy several geographically separated habitat patches. Although the individual patches may become extinct locally, they may be recolonized through migration from other patches. We are developing models that account for the persistence of these populations and which provide an effective means of studying their long-term behaviour. We have given particular attention to populations for which extinction and colonization happens in distinct phases, often at different stages in the organism's life cycle. Deterministic and distributional approximation methods have been developed. We have also constructed models for spatially structured populations, exploiting recent developments in stochastic network theory; by recording the numbers of individuals in the various patches, we are able to incorporate local patch dynamics, spatial structure and migration patterns.

  Research outputs

  • Buckley, F.M. (2011) Analytical Methods for Stochastic Discrete-time Metapopulation Models, PhD Thesis, The University of Queensland (degree awarded April 2011).
  • Chan, J. (2011) A Stochastic Model for Metapopulation Systems with Unlimited Resources and Accounts for Dynamic Landscapes Honours Thesis, The University of Queensland (degree awarded December 2011).
  • McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2011) The limiting behaviour of a mainland-island metapopulation. Journal of Mathematical Biology (In press: accepted 12/05/2011).
  • McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2011) Interaction between habitat quality and an Allee-like effect in metapopulations. In (Eds. Chan, F., Marinova, D. and Anderssen, R.S.) Proceedings of the 19th Biennial Congress on Modelling and Simulation (MODSIM2011), Modelling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand, December 2011, pp. 2254-2260.
  • Additionally, this work was presented at the Workshop on Discrete Mathematics and Probability in Networks and Population Biology (Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore, Singapore, 9-13 May 2011) and at the 3rd Wellington Workshop in Probability and Mathematical Statistics (Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 28-29 November 2011).
• Fault Detection and Diagnosis in Complex and Distributed Systems

  Project leader: Phil Pollett (UQ)
  Researchers: Ross McVinish (UQ) and Dejan Jovanovic (UQ)

  We are developing methods for detecting, identifying and isolating faults in complex and distributed systems. We have derived stochastic models that are capable of interpreting the state of the system via local observations and information exchange with neighbouring subsystems.

  Research outputs

  • Jovanovic, D., McVinish, R. and P.K. Pollett (2011) Fault modelling using a mixture of conditional Gaussian transitions. In (Ed. Argyrios Zolotas) Proceedings of the 19th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation, IEEE, June 2011, pp. 473-478.
  • Jovanovic, D. and P.K. Pollett (2011) Fault diagnosis using consensus of Markov chains. In (Eds. Georg Frey and Felix Felgner) Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Dependable Control of Discrete Systems, IEEE, June 2011, pp. 65-71.

Awards and Achievements

• Honours student Jessica Chan was awarded an International Biometric Society (IBS) Honours Scholarship (January 2011)
• Honours student Jessica Chan was awarded one of two UQ School of Mathematics and Physics Outstanding Tutor Awards for 2011.
• Phil Pollett (with Kostya Borovkov, Andrew Barbour and Aihua Xia, The University of Melbourne, Alexander Novikov, University of Technology Sydney, Malwina Luczak, University of Sheffield, and Gesine Reinert, Oxford University) was awarded $300,000 for a project titled "Random network models with applications in biology" under the ARC Discovery Project Scheme (2012-2014)
• PhD student Aminath Shausan was awarded first prize at School Poster Day (School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland) for her poster titled "Spread of an SIS Epidemic in a Network" (September 2011).