Thesis / Projects

Research or Master Projects
Master’s and Bachelor’s Theses

How to get a topic?

General

Please talk to members of the lab about potential topics or have a look at the list of open topics below (note that sometimes the list gets outdated). General topics and fields of research can typically be found on the personal pages of the individual group members. We generally advise everybody to browse through the lab website, have a look at the group and individual member pages to find a topic of your interest. Then please contact the persons that work on topics of your interest directly (please send CV & transcript of records). Another option is to register on our mailing list on which we highlight invited talks, and possible topics for Master’s and Bachelor’s thesis. You can register for this list here.

Research/Master Projects
  • Preferred: Come up with an own project and find a suitable supervisor
  • Participate in an ML challenge and report progress
  • Take one of the open topics from below

Typically, a project requires to write a 6-10 page report.

Open topics (MT/BT/RP/MP)

A Master’s/Bachelor’s thesis consists of the following parts:

  • The thesis itself
  • An implementation of the method/s
  • Participation in the respective colloquium
  • A short presentation of the topic at the beginning of the work
  • A final presentation shortly before the end of the thesis

Colloquium


Every colloquium takes place on a weekly basis. Please refer to the course list on the chair’s website for the individual day and time of the respective colloquium.

In the colloquium, we read and discuss scientific articles that focus on a selected topics. The goal is to acquire additional experience, both in paper reading as a skill in its own right, and in other topic ibesides the current thesis. Additionally, the colloquium offers students a platform to give presentations on their work.

Thus, every student who writes a thesis at the lab is asked to participate in at least 50% of the group meetings. Papers that will be discussed will be shared via the colloquium mailing list a couple of days before the meeting.

In the course of his/her thesis, each students must give a short presentation at the beginning of his/her work. The short presentation should not exceed 10 minutes. It should give an introduction to the topic of the thesis, and the chosen approaches for successful completion of the thesis.

About 6 weeks before the thesis finishes, the final presentation takes place. This is a 30 minutes talk that should include all results the candidate has achieved so far. However, it is clear that these results are not necessarily “final”; our experience has shown that while discussing the work with a little more concrete data, different people often come up with interesting ideas. Thus, we find it reasonable to have such a discussion before the actual deadline for handing in the thesis. The templates for the slides are the same as for the short presentation.

Writing the Thesis


Writing a thesis, i.e. a many-pages long scientific text, must be practiced. There are a number of rules that should be kept in mind. First of all, the formatting is done in LaTeX. You will need some proficiency in bibtex as well, in order to cite relevant related work. When typesetting math, your readers have particular expectations on what elements should be bold face, italic or slanted.

A good starter is the short math guide from the AMS. It is good practice to discuss content and formatting with your advisor once the first couple of sections have been written / in a very early stage of the work. Also note the thesis guidelines below, defining several rules for the typesetting of equations, e.g. matrices and vectors are bold, scalar values not.

General Guidelines


For all students working on a thesis these (english version) guidelines apply.

LaTeX Templates


Students should use this template for their thesis.

Handling equations


Basic rules for handling math and equations: “What’s wrong with these equations?“