On this page, we present our project ideas for Bachelor's and Master's theses. Most projects are also suitable as internship project or Ph.D. thesis project. Please note that you need to register an account to see the projects. There are various options of how you can approach your Bachelor's or Master’s thesis. You can develop a novel software tool, create novel algorithms, evaluate existing algorithms, and many things more. In the following, we explain what type of research projects exists and list our project ideas

...

What makes them ‘good’ is that they answer a question that has not been answered before (paper 3), or they propose a novel algorithm/concept (papers 1 and 2). In either case, they provide evidence that their answer is true, or their novel algorithm is better than the state of the art.

Our Project Ideas

Resource Projects (Datasets or Software)

...

1. Auto-Surprise: An Automated Recommender-System (AutoRecSys) Library with Tree of Parzens Estimator (TPE) Optimization

2. GIANT: The 1-Billion Annotated Synthetic Bibliographic-Reference-String Dataset for Deep Citation Parsing

3. RARD II: The 94 Million Related-Article Recommendation Dataset

4. The Architecture and Datasets of Docear's Research Paper Recommender System

Our Project Ideas

Applied Research Projects

In “applied research” you aim at improving one field of application -- e.g. movie recommendation, lung-cancer prediction, face recognition, or stock market prediction. Typically in such a project, you ‘throw’ a large number of existing algorithms on the novel scenario, and see what algorithms perform best. For a Bachelor’s or Master’s thesis, such a project is fine. However, from a scientific point of view, such projects are normally considered second-class. Such projects often involve a lot of trial and error, and less theoretically founded idea. To illustrate the point: Imagine a person A) who proposed the idea of Support Vector Machines and evaluated the first SVM on a dataset with handwritten digits and a person B) who later proposed to apply SVMs on classifying images of cats and dogs. Person A) clearly made a much more significant contribution to the world. Nevertheless, applied research papers can make valuable contributions to the field (we have published many applied research papers ourselves).

Our Project Ideas

Reproducibility Projects

Reproducibility projects are about confirming or disconfirming the results of someone else's' work. There three different scenarios.

...

You can do a large-scale reproducibility study, in which you try to reproduce the work of many authors. Such a study recently won the best-paper award at the RecSys conference: Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches. This kind of work is not suitable for a Bachelors’s or Master’s thesis, but only for part of a Ph.D. (think of a year of work).

Our Project Ideas

Comparative Studies

In a comparative study, you compare a large number of algorithms or tools to identify the best one or the advantages and disadvantages of each. This type of work can be similar to a reproducibility study, but the framing/writing of the paper is different. Also, a comparative study typically aims at well-established software tools (e.g. machine learning tools like Weka, sci-kit learn, H.2, TensorFlow, …). A reproducibility study rather aims at novel algorithms that are not yet integrated into software libraries like Tensorflow.

...

The examples above are relatively brief, but you may make such studies very comprehensive and even publish them in journals.

Our Project Ideas

Industry or Application Projects

...

An example would be our paper Data Pruning in Recommender Systems Research: Best Practice or Malpractice? although it was officially published as a research poster, and not as a position paper.

Our Project Ideas

Literature Surveys

A literature survey summarizes a large amount of literature relating to one particular topic. Every type of research project – be it a research article, a resource paper, or a comparative study – must contain some literature survey, summarized in the related work section. As a Bachelor’s student, your entire thesis may be a literature survey. However, your survey must be really comprehensive, and it is not easy to do this well! We would only agree to supervise a literature survey as a thesis project if you are already very familiar with that research field. Furthermore, you must be an excellent writer, and very well at organizing and structuring.

...

A survey, or poll, is typically a kind of research paper. Computer scientists rarely conduct surveys but that does not mean, you shouldn’t do it if you have a good idea for a survey.

Our Project Ideas