Involved people:

Student - The person who wants to write the thesis

Advisor - The research associate (“wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter”) who will advise you throughout the thesis writing period. 

First examiner - The person who will grade your thesis and also supervise the writing process together with the Advisor. You meet him once per month.

Second examiner - The person who will provide a second grade for your thesis.

The grade will be the average of both examiner grades. 

Writing Exposé 

The aim of an exposé is to record that the essence of the task has been understood. In particular, the exposé should reflect the context in which the task is embedded, the scope of the task and the research methods that are going to be applied. An exposé is 1-2 pages long. The following points should be reflected inside the exposé

1. Motivation for the task: What are the areas of application for the method to be developed? Why is it interesting/important to solve the problem? Why is it difficult to solve the problem?

2. Contextualization in existing works:What methods already exist to solve the problem? What are the limits of the existing methods? Which basic idea should be pursued in order to develop a new process or to improve existing processes?

3. How is the result to be evaluated? Which data sets are suitable for experiments? Do these have to be generated? Which comparison metrics are relevant? e.g. runtime, accuracy, completeness. Which related methods and variants of your own method should be compared?

4. Exclusion of orthogonal concepts, if applicable:  What assumptions are made for the valuations? E.g. data is in the main memory, limitation to data of one language.

5. IMPORTANT: Make sure to also submit the data privacy form with the exposé. Ask the supervisor for the form.

Referenz: https://cs.stanford.edu/people/widom/paper-writing.html#intro

Registration of the Thesis:

Once Prof. Abedjan approved your Exposé, you should fill out the registration form from the examination office to register your thesis as described below:

1. The registration form consists of two pages. The first page should be first approved by the examination office. It shows that you are eligible to pursue the thesis.

2. You fill out the second page with your name and matriculation number and thesis title. Please ask your direct advisor which thesis title you should choose for the form. 

3. Once you filled out the form, please scan the form and send it as a pdf-File to Prof. Abedjan. Prof. Abedjan will assign another professor as the second examiner and organize the corresponding signatures.

4. Once you receive the signed form from Prof. Abedjan and the second examiner, you can submit it to the examination office. Please put Prof. Abedjan in CC, so that he knows that the registration is concluded.

5.  Finally you notify your advisor, so he/she can set up the weekly meeting with you.

6. Please complete the data privacy consent form and submit it with your registration to your advisor. 

Grading Criteria

Bachelor Thesis 

For a Bachelor’s Thesis, the work will be evaluated based on the following aspects: structure of the thesis, general comprehensibility, clarity of motivation and problem definition; Identification of technical challenges; systematic experimental setup and result interpretation. 

1. Structure: The thesis should follow a top-down structure. The thesis should first introduce the background and the motivation of the problem to be solved. Then, the problem should be defined systematically, highlighting the research questions to be answered. These research questions should be answered by introducing scientific methods used to solve the problem. Finally, experiments should be designed to test the methodology and the result should be interpreted properly.

2. Language: The thesis should be comprehensible without significant amounts of grammar or spelling errors. Suitable technical terms should be used properly and defined if necessary. The thesis should follow a scientific writing style.

3. Motivation and background: The motivation should clearly stress the real-life motivation for solving the problem at hand. The motivation and problem definition should be rooted in existing literature, if possible. The technical difficulty should be emphasized.

4. Problem definition: The problem should be defined in a clear way that can be tested by designing experiments. The whole problem should be derived into one or several research questions.

5. Technical challenges: These chapters should introduce how the technical difficulties from the motivation are solved. This can be done by introducing the key components, algorithms or methodology used in the project. 

6. Experiment setup: The experiment should be scientifically defined and described, and then independently conducted. It should be able to test the performance of the proposed methodology on solving the problem. Innovation based on the existing work is encouraged.

7. Result: Suitable evaluation metrics should be selected as the final result. The result should be properly described and interpreted. The result should be clear and able to answer the research questions. A conclusion is expected based on the result interpretation.

Points will be deducted when a certain aspect cannot be fulfilled. At least half of the requirements should be fulfilled to pass the Bachelor’s Thesis. Frequent language mistakes that lead to an incomprehensible Thesis will result in failing to pass the Bachelor’s Thesis, regardless of the other requirements.

Master Thesis 

For a Master’s Thesis, the work will be evaluated based on the following aspects: structure of the thesis, general comprehensibility, clarity of motivation and problem definition; systematic literature review; identification of the technical challenges and novel solutions; systematic experimental setup and result interpretation; complying to scientific writing; the independence and motivation in the work.

1. Structure: The thesis should follow a top-down structure. The thesis should first introduce the background and the motivation of the problem to be solved. Then, the related work should be introduced systematically and the challenges that will be tackled in this work should be discussed. The problem should be defined systematically, highlighting the research questions to be answered. These research questions should be answered by introducing scientific methods used to solve the problem. Finally, experiments should be designed to test the methodology and the result should be interpreted properly.

2. Motivation and background: The motivation should clearly stress the real-life motivation for solving the problem at hand. The motivation and problem definition should be rooted in existing literature, if possible. The challenges and technical difficulty should be emphasized.

3. Related work: A systematic literature review should be carried out. The student should be able to identify the related areas and search for the most significant related work. Every piece of related work should be summarized in a concise and comprehensive way. The advantages and limitations of previous work should be discussed. The relevance to this work and the improvement made in this work need to be pointed out.

4. Problem definition: The problem should be defined in a clear way that can be tested by designing experiments. The whole problem should be derived into one or several research questions.

5. Methodology: These chapters should introduce how the technical difficulties from the motivation are solved. This can be done by introducing the key components, algorithms, or methodology used in the project. The goal is to  expand beyond state-of-the-art. Every design decision should be discussed and supported with arguments or empirics.

6. Experiment setup: The experiment should be scientifically defined and described, and then independently conducted. Experimental questions and setup should match so that experiments support the claims of the thesis.

7. Result: Suitable evaluation metrics should be selected as the final result to support the claims. The results should be properly described and interpreted. A sound conclusion is expected based on the result interpretation.

8. Writing: The thesis should be comprehensible without significant amounts of grammar or spelling errors. Suitable technical terms should be used properly and defined if necessary. Every figure and table should be described and discussed in the text. Every statement should be justified. The thesis should follow a scientific writing style. 

9. Others: The students need to show their independence and motivation in the work. The student is expected to show high independence in coming up with creative solutions and carrying out experiments.

Points will be deducted when a certain aspect cannot be fulfilled. At least half of the requirements should be fulfilled to pass the Master’s Thesis. Frequent language mistakes that lead to an incomprehensible thesis will result in failing to pass the Master’s Thesis, regardless of the other requirements.

Submission of the thesis 

You should use the template prepared here. For the submission, you should send your thesis document latest on the deadline date at 23:59 via email to Prof. Abedjan, the co-reviewer, and your advisor. Two printed versions have to arrive in our group in the following days. If it is not possible to give the thesis to our group staff, you can put it in our mail box on the first floor of the main building. (Lichthof, Hauptgebäude, LUH, mailbox 75, Prof. Abedjan). Please consider that both submissions, the digital and the printed version, must include a signed “Selbstständigkeitserklärung”. For the digital version, this signature can be also digital. 

Defense

You should set the defense date with your advisor. Usually, the defense is around one month after your deadline. For the defense session, you have 20 minutes to present your work. After that, we will have 10 minutes of questions and answers. There are no predesigned templates for your slides.  You can present your work in German or English.