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The primary research focus of the School of Information Technology is on:
Apart from this primary focus, individual staff members do research over an extensive range of fields. We also do research in inter-disciplinary teams with other Campuses, Departments, and Faculties within Monash, as well as with other universities and research institutions in South Africa and across the globe.
The School of IT hosts and organises the following:
For the first fifty years of computing, applications were built for government, the military and business. Since the 1990s computing became increasingly available to ordinary people. This resulted in social networks being formed, using computers for communication.
Community Informatics focuses on the use of computers by social groups. Communities of interest have different needs than the military, government or business. Community Informatics is an interdisciplinary science investigating all the dimensions of social computing, investigating these different needs and solutions to meet those needs.
Our School's research focus falls under the umbrella of COSI (Centre for Organisational and Social Informatics), in cooperation with the CCNR (Centre for Community Networking Research) at the Caulfield Campus of Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Some important concepts in Community Informatics are: social exclusion and inclusion; the digital divide, social networks, social media, Web 2.0, e-governance, e-democracy, e-health.
Development Informatics is a sub-discipline of Community Informatics, but with a special focus on rural and remote communities.
Rural communities in both the highly developed world and the developing world are typically excluded from connectivity to computer networks.
A remote community is one that is not necessarily geographically remote, but also one that is socially remote from mainstream communities. Deep rural communities are obviously geographically remote. But even in highly developed economies some social groups may be on the fringe of mainstream society. The elderely, inner-city youth, the poor, and other fringe groups are often marginalised.
Development Informatics focus on these groups. But a strong element of Development Informatics is communities in rural areas. More than 1 billion of the global population live in rural areas, and this situation will continue beyond year 2050. So, how do we connect these people?
Rural people, especially in the developing world, are typically poor and often illiterate. Energy and communication networks are often lacking, resulting in inability to connect. These constraints, not typically found in standard Community Informatics environments, are to be addressed.
The World Wide Web (WWW) no longer needs introduction as it has been one of the most revolutionary methods in the history of mankind for communication between institutions as well as between individuals.
But the WWW is still an immature solution with a lot of scope for researched improvement.
We are interested in topics such as the unconnected or diconnected web, optimising web systems for low bandwidth, user-friendly interfaces, interfaces for illiterate or semi-literate users, the ubiquitous and pervasive web, converging technologies (seamless integration of PCs, mobile phones, TV, household devices, etc.), e-Governance and related topics.
We are committed to develop solutions based on the principles of Open Source and W3C Recommendations, such as the XML-family, CSS and HTML 5.0.
There are now more mobile phones in the world than PCs, and the device we call a mobile phone is no longer just a phone, but a smart device, more powerful than desktop PCs of a few years ago.
Most of the developments in the domain of the PC since about 1980s are now being repeated in the domain of the smart mobile device. These devices can now do most of the things previously only possible with PCs and larger computers.
This means there are system design issues, usability and interface design issues, and in fact any PC issue now also applies to the mobile domain. There is thus huge scope for research in this field.
Some of our research topics are: