Your Own Project Idea

Having your own idea for a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis is excellent! It usually means you will have a high motivation to work on it, and you probably already have some background knowledge; both are essential factors in successfully writing a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis. Therefore, you are very welcome to contact us if you have your own idea for a thesis project, if it relates to (automated) machine learning, recommender systems, information retrieval, or one of our other research interests.

However, please understand that we do not have the capacity to develop an idea with you. If you want us to supervise your own project idea, you must have excellent knowledge in the field and should be really sure that your idea is novel and feasible to do. Something like “I want to apply machine learning to improve application X” is typically not a sufficiently well-developed idea.

If you have your idea, please apply for thesis supervision, and additionally, send the following details:

  1. Title of the project
  2. Background of your research  [1 paragraph]. A brief explanation about the field you want to do research in.
  3. Research problem [1 paragraph]: The problem you want to solve and why it is important. It must be a specific measurable problem.
  4. Research goal [1 paragraph]: What do you want to achieve exactly to solve the problem? Develop a novel algorithm? Adjust an existing algorithm? Apply an existing algorithm to a new domain? Compare a large number of algorithms? Develop a novel application? And what would the benefit be? Time savings? Cost savings? Better performance? …?
  5. Related work [1 paragraph]: What solutions are out there already, and why are they not sufficient? How is your solution better?
  6. Methodology [at least 1 paragraph]: How will you achieve your research goal? Keep in mind, it is not enough to have a noble goal (“I want to improve machine learning”; “I want to cure HIV”). You must have a plan for how to achieve that goal. Where do you get the required data from, what algorithms could you use as a baseline? Which programming language and software libraries would you use?