Description
Introduction
The capstone project is a major component of the degree, worth 30 of 90 ECTS. That represents about 600 hours of work.
2 Learning Outcomes
- Identify/research a Data Analytics (DA) / Artificial Intelligence (AI) problem
- Identify, describe, and synthesize the state-of-the-art approaches to the problem
- Devise and implement a solution to the problem which may have some novelty
- Carry out experimental evaluation on the solution
- Write up the problem, state-of-the-art, implementation, experimental evaluation, results, and conclusion as a thesis.
The project is in the area of DA/AI. It is a research project, not software development. The outcome is a document (the thesis) describing your research – not (usually) a viable commercial product.
6 Project Proposal
The formal Project Proposal should describe a research problem to be solved in some detail, including background, motivation, and proposed research methods. It should incorporate a highquality Literature Review. (For students who have taken the Research Skills module, the Literature
Review produced earlier may be re-used in the proposal in part or in whole.)
This document should normally be between 11 and 24 pages long (plus references). Supervisors will give feedback verbally or on Blackboard.
The template for the final thesis (see 7.2) should also be used for the Project Proposal (but normally only a part of the template can already be completed at this time).
Normally, faculty approve the Project Proposal. However, faculty may reject a low-quality proposal and require a complete redesign or a new topic
7 Final Thesis Document
The document should follow a typical scientific structure (see template). Guideline page counts are given in the template. It should clearly distinguish between your primary and secondary research, i.e., between what has previously been accomplished, and what has been accomplished by you. The number of words in the PDF thesis document (not in the LaTeX source) should be between
8,000 and 13,000 (not including title page, Declaration, Acknowledgements, List of Figures, List of Tables, Table of Contents and Bibliography). 13,000 is a strict upper limit – longer theses may be rejected without review.
7.1 Writing and Style
The goal of the document is to convince a skeptical, well-informed reader, and to document work
done.
The document should be written for other researchers. It should assume the reader knows at least undergrad-level material. It should be written in clear, simple English, with short sentences and little or no “poetic” language. Graphics and tables should be clean, with no frills or decoration. The best way to develop an appropriate style of writing and formatting a paper is by reading many high-quality research papers. Examples of good-quality theses from previous years are also available in Blackboard.
A draft which has not been edited will rarely achieve quality. “The best writing is rewriting.” – E B White. “My pencils outlast their erasers.” – Vladimir Nabokov. Supervisors will give feedback on writing. The best way to receive useful feedback is to edit your own drafts first, then request feedback on specific sections and/or on overall structure – the earlier, the better.
The document should be focused on relevant material, with no padding and little repetition. (But it is appropriate to have some repetition between the abstract, introduction, and conclusions; and some repetition where main points in the introduction are expanded elsewhere.)
7.2 Thesis Template
We provide a thesis template in Latex format. The .zip is downloadable from Blackboard. It contains instructions for use. Latex is recommended, but students who prefer other software are free to use it. They need then mimic the thesis template format. The Project Proposal and final thesis should both adhere to this format and should both be submitted in PDF format. So, the proposal can be seen as a first (incomplete) draft of the thesis. Also see Sect. 10 (Submission).
Publication
For faculty, publication is a core goal of research. A thesis which we evaluate as publishable receives a high grade. Students can optionally demonstrate publishability by extracting a submission-ready research paper from their thesis. This would typically by 8-15 pages in a much more compressed and focused style, targeted at a specific journal or conference. Students should discuss the possibility with their supervisor before engaging in this work.
For some projects, it may be appropriate to provide Latex source, code and data to the supervisor to allow for further experimentation and writing either by the supervisor or by a future student – standing on the shoulders of giants.
