Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External supervisor: Javed Khan

Business Needs

1. Improving the visibility of data in a global manufacturer’s head office. Current businesses have a plethora of data and analytics, critical for strategic, tactical and operational decision-making. Interactive displays in an office can support that decision making process. For this assignment you will investigate user needs of senior management in Sappi’s head office. Based on that investigation you will design and implement dashboards to be displayed in a high-tech interactive display in Sappi’s head office in Brussels, Belgium.
2. Improving everyday work-related chores. In this assignment you will investigate how office workers deal with IT systems for completing chores such as filling expenses. Based on that investigation you will propose a system to make such processes more efficient.

The Horizon Europe funding creates opportunities for Sappi to both fund and solve, through collaborations with other complementing organizations. However, in our experience in trying to partner with other organizations to pursue funding on digital initiatives, we have found a luck of detailed use-cases, which would the basis of filtering the proposed calls for funding.

Main Activities

• Conduct user research such as interviews and contextual inquiry.
• Qualitative and quantitative analysis.
• Design of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Implementation of dashboards for semi-public, interactive displays.
• Investigation of modern IT systems.

Success Metrics

1. Dashboards are user-friendly and informative,
2. User findings are thorough, actionable and convincing,
3. Suggestions for improvements are actionable and convincing,
4. student’s attitude: quick response time, proactiveness and independence.

Company and Team

The internship will take place within the Digital Transformation (DT) team of Sappi Europe, in Brussels, Belgium.

Sappi is a global company focused on providing dissolving pulp, paper pulp, paper-based and biorefinery solutions to its customers in over 150 countries. Headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, Sappi Europe is the leading European producer and supplier of coated fine paper, packaging and specialty papers.

More about the company at: https://www.sappi.com/

Company coach

Dr.ir. Javed Khan is Head of UX in Sappi. Furthermore, he serves as an associate editor at the Behavior and Information Technology journal. Javed holds a PhD. and a P.D.Eng. degree from Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e) and a MSc. in Computer Engineering from the University of Patras. In the past he held the position (tenured) of assistant professor at TU/e’s department of Industrial Design and before that of senior lecturer at Breda University of Applied Sciences. Finally, he gained industrial R&D experience, in design and HCI research positions, at Philips Research, Vodafone and Greece’s Computer Technology Institute.

More about the coach at: http://khan.gr/

Master #thesis in #DigitalTransformation in SAPPI: a global manufacturer of sustainable materials at TiU.
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For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link:
https://francescolelli.info/thesis/

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External Supervisor: Assigned by ESA case by case

The European Space Agency (ESA) offer a set of internship for students that want to do a thesis and contribute to the success of the European space program.  Some require you to be (just) graduated and some can be done in conjunction of your master thesis. They span in all the areas of Engineering, Computer Science and Information Management.  The department of Management has a collaboration in the areas of Software Engineering and Information Management with particular interest in AI and Big Data. In this respect, you are welcome to be an intern at ESA while pursuing your thesis for graduating in Information Management.   

4 different types of internship are available:

Student Internship

This internship cover a period of 3-6 months and is specifically focused on building a thesis at ESA. There are windows of time when they can apply and they are renewed every 6 months.

Link for more information:

• https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA/Student_Internships2

YGT: Young graduate trainee

This program is for students that are willing to consider a longer staying at ESA, the duration is 1+1 year and require you to be a graduate students or that the thesis is the only thing that you are missing. You are going to receive a proper salary and you will be employed in one of the 4 centers (Frankfurt, Leiden, Madrid or Rome) of the agency for the duration of your full time contract.

Link for more information:

• https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA/Apply_now_for_new_Young_Graduate_Trainee_opportunities

National trainee

These internships follow a similar trajectory of the YGT program, however a specific for a particular country and will require you to have a specific nationality.

Link for more information:

• https://www.esa.int/About_Us/Careers_at_ESA/Graduates_National_Trainees

These positions also require an interaction with you and the national initiatives.

Specific Trainee positions:

Link for more information (look for “trainee”) : 

• https://career2.successfactors.eu/career?company=esa

In this DB you can find all the positions that are currently open at ESA, if a particular research group requires a specific intern is advertise it here. You should look using the keyword “trainee”.

A Final Note on Internships and Fellowships at the European Space Agency

Our specific collaboration focus on the ESOC and ESTEC programs nevertheless the internships program is a single program for all the initiatives that are currently pursued at ESA.

Within this respect, the first selection process at ESA is centralized and equal for all the candidates. Consequently, if you are interested in pursuing a “thesis plus internship” you need to pass the first stage of the selection before been able to propose/define a topic of investigation.  The selection process and definition of the topic will follow this trajectory:

Phase 1: Interested candidates should apply for the proper internship program.

Phase 2: the candidate will be assessed by the ESA-HR

Phase 3: If successful, the candidate will be part of the trainee and inserted in an internal DB at ESA where scientists will look at your profile in search for a match with their interest. 

Phase 4: you will be contacted by ESA with a few possibilities for pursuing the internship

Phase 5: You will get in touch with me and we will decide how to finalize your thesis proposal in order to be able to do your thesis in Information Management as part of the ESA program.

#thesis plus #internships or Fellowships at the European Space Agency ( #ESA ) in the areas of #BigData and #AI
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For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link: 
https://francescolelli.info/thesis/

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

External supervisor: Omid Feyli

The “Customer Journey” refers to the process of measure, understand and analyze the interactions that a customer has with a particular brand or product. The candidate will devise difference and similarities of these techniques with the digital experience that the students have with the university. In particular, he/she will evaluate and analyze various approaches for measuring and enhancing the digital experience that the students have in interacting with the university in various phases of their studies. This thesis is not about interviewing students or send surveys around; it is way more concrete and data driven. Example of topic of interest includes:

• Data collection and quality
• Data enhancing using popular social networks and search engine (Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. )
• Data reporting and filtering.
• Digital Analytics

The candidate will propose alternatives and develop proof of concepts that will be evaluated by the marketing division for refining the “digital student journey” of the students of the university.

If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• A generic article in Wikipedia about the customer experience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Customer_experience
• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Digital Analytics, Digital Customer Journey, Digital Customer Experience, Data driven approach, touchpoint analysis 

A few resources for a practical understanding of the tools that may be used:

1. Google analytics academy: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/academy/
2. Facebook for business: https://www.facebook.com/business/learn

This thesis is in conjunction with an internship at the marketing department of TiU, consequently your candidature will be subject to a scrutiny process that will proceed as follows:

Phase 1: Interested candidate should contact: Francesco Lelli (link) for a preliminary discussion of their ideas and the draft of a preliminarily proposal.

Phase 2: the candidate will be interviewed by a representative of the marketing department

Phase 3: If successful, the candidate will produce a full proposal for his/her thesis that will be submitted for a final go/no go evaluation.

Phase 4: the thesis and the internship will start as agreed by your supervisor and your mentor at the marketing department.

Note: this internship is remunerated and extra credits may be available upon a discussion with the head of the marketing division.

Master #thesis about digital student journey available at TiU. #DigitalTransformation #CustomerExperience
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For a complete list of available thesis please visit the following link:
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Mentor at TiU: Francesco Lelli 

Mentors at Talpa: Anca Dumitrache and/or Ricardo Fabian Guevara

There are some internships opportunities available at Talpa. You will have the opportunity to develop your master’s thesis in collaboration with the AI division of one of the most innovative media companies in the Netherlands .

If you have a go-get attitude with the desire to expand your knowledge and expertise in the area of big data and artificial intelligence, this is probably the internship that you are looking for.

Topics for this thesis include Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning and Predictors. At the same time you are encouraged to propose your own idea as well.

Knowledge and Skills:

Programming, preferably Python, and/or statistical skills.

Interested in Joining Talpa?

Here you can find a short presentation of the company:

Where to Read More:

The following ideas are possible internship opportunities and related topic for your thesis. You may want to use them for forming an idea of the kind of jobs that you will be doing at Talpa as well as for developing your research proposal (here you can find a few tips for that).

Swimlane for Trending on Social Media

Both KIJK (video streaming platform) and JUKE (audio streaming platform) present their content separated into swimlanes on the front page. For instance, one swimlane contains a list of TV shows that were popular in the previous days. We would like to create a new swimlane that contains items that were trending on social media. Taking Twitter as a data source, the project will go through the following steps:

• (1) extract tweets about popular TV shows and/or radio shows,
• (2) perform entity linking to match them to the shows in our database,
• (3) aggregate the results to get the most popular shows in one swimlane.

Project: KIJK and/or JUKE

Automatic Teaser Tweet Creation

Starting with a (textual) description of a TV show episode or radio program, we would like to generate teaser tweets about the show that are meant to generate anticipation on social media. The underlying task would be a summarization problem, where the program description is mapped to a short tweet about it. The tweet should contain relevant information about the program, but not reveal any spoilers. Either an extractive (entity + relation extraction) or abstractive method could be applied.

Source: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N19-1398/

Project: KIJK and/or JUKE

Exploring Pair-wise Learning-to-Rank

Talpa current recommender system uses ALS, a point-wise learning-to-rank approach, where the learning objective is based on modeling the score of a given item (i.e. similarly to how regression works). Alternative methods of doing learning-to-rank are pair-wise (learning objective is to model the ranking of a pair of items relative to each other) and list-wise learning to rank (learning objective is calculated over the entire list of items). The project goal is to investigate different learning objectives and find out:

• (1) how they perform relatively to the point-wise method,
• (2) if there are subsets of data where this method works better/worse.

Source:https://medium.com/@nikhilbd/pointwise-vs-pairwise-vs-listwise-learning-to-rank-80a8fe8fadfd

Project: KIJK and/or JUKE

Automatic Playlist Generation

JUKE music player features a lot of non-stop music playlists that are manually created by an editor, usually selecting music from a given genre (e.g. hard rock non-stop radio). We would like to see whether these playlists can be generated by AI and what the quality is. This can be approached as a song clustering problem, where the feature space could contain the genre, artist, as well as other audio features.

Project: JUKE

Google AdWords for Video

Advertisers can buy Google search keywords to show their ad in conjunction with them. We would like to see whether it is possible to do something similar within videos, too. In this way, contextual advertising in different medias becomes feasible. The steps involved in this project are:

• (1) generate textual metadata of video (either based on transcript, or other features of the video; there might be some existing video metadata as well),
• (2) match video textual metadata with ad keywords.

Exploring Seasonal Trends as RecSys Features

Our domain experts know that both video and audio streaming trends are highly influenced by seasonality (e.g. Sky Radio becomes very popular over Christmas). The goal of this project is to:

• (1) identify these trends by studying user listening data, then
• (2) incorporating these trends into our prediction model (e.g. recommend Sky Radio to fans of Christmas music, but only over the Christmas holidays).

Challenge: a lot of data may be needed to accomplish this.

Project: KIJK and/or JUKE

Radio Station Embeddings

Goal: produce embedding with various sizes similar to Glove but for radio stations that reflect radio station similarity with euclidean distance.

Value: many of Talpa challenges, like radio to radio similarity, could be tackled with this approach. Our RecSys can also use the radio embedding as a feature to determine if a radio channel is a good match for a user. This could also greatly alleviate the cold start problem when we introduce new radio stations.

Approach: this is an unexplored problem but there has been previous research and practical work done on audio embeddings. In the simplest form, a radio station embedding could be just a bag of features like genre frequencies, languages and origins of artists, but also properties from the target audience like age range. Going beyond that, it could use an average of the embeddings of representative songs on it in a given past period. Another valuable asset of Talpa is its understanding of usage behavior, so radio station features could also be calculated based on the type of person who listens to it, the frequency of listening and other seasonal behavior.

At the same time, there is a temporal aspect to take into consideration when analyzing user preference of radio stations. Therefore, we cannot expect the embeddings to remain the same forever. Consequently a refresh period is to be expected (even word embeddings need to account for word semantic drifting, only their refresh window is larger).

Project: Juke

Podcast Embeddings for JUKE

Similar to the radio embeddings project, Talpa is interested in creating embeddings for the podcasts available on JUKE. Podcast recommendations suffer from cold start problem even more than radio, since there is usually a high volume of items that are published continuously. The features that can be used for podcast embeddings are also slightly different than typical audio embedding features based on e.g. musical genre.

Project: Juke

Interested in a Talpa internship? Check also the Following:

Webinar about Talpa Internship Opportunities (Available for Tilburg Student Only)

Interested in Applying?

Send an email to Francesco Lelli with CV, Short motivation letter, project(s) that interest you and (optional) draft research proposal. In the case you would like to propose a particular project please put extra attention to your research proposal.

A selected list of candidates will be interviewed by TALPA that has the ultimate saying on accepting you for an internship. Succes, Good luck, In Bocca al Lupo!

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EY Internship Fast Track

The ‘Internship Fast Track’ is an initiative of Tilburg University and EY to speed up the internship selection process and assure alignment between research topics and field relevance. The selection process is integrated with preparations of your thesis proposal, and is composed of the following phases:

• Phase 1:  You work with your Tilburg University supervisor on a one-page thesis proposal and reach a preliminary agreement on the topic. I encourage you in contacting me as soon as you have decided that this opportunity can be beneficial for your career goals.
• Phase 2: Next, you start the selection process at EY. EY will always have the final say in admitting you as intern. The fact that you are presenting yourself with a relevant proposal can help you in this phase.
• Phase 3:If you are accepted at EY, you will refine and finalize the thesis proposal in collaboration with your Tilburg University supervisor and the selected thesis mentor at EY.
• Phase 4: You start your internship at EY and work on your thesis (normally 3 – 6 months). Note that the internship does not guarantee you a prolonged position at EY, however, as ex-intern you do not need to re-do the formal HR selection tests.  

Internship reward: yes

Location: Netherlands (Amsterdam office or Eindhoven)

If you are interested in an internship at EY following our “EY Internship Fast Track” agreement, do not hesitate to contact us for more information. Contact details: Piet Verhoeven ( piet.verhoeven@nl.ey.com ) or Francesco Lelli.

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EY is looking for interns (or recent graduates) with Blockchain skills for the EY Technology Consulting team.

In today’s market, companies are looking for the latest technologies to improve the efficiency of their business processes. Emerging technologies, such as Blockchain, are disrupting our clients markets and require innovative solutions to remain competitive. You will have the opportunity to work with new technologies, solving real problems with your colleagues. As part of the Technology Consulting team you have a unique opportunity to work on your master thesis project and get real experience on the job in delivering projects. We expect you to do your research on a practical Blockchain subject. This could mean exploring and working on use cases, researching various types of Blockchains, etc. or maybe you already have a great idea that we should know about. We expect that you either know how to code smart contracts (e.g. in Solidity) or have the ability and mindset to pick up these skills quickly. Besides coding skills, you are fluent in Dutch and English (speech and writing), you have a hands-on mentality, are willing to travel.

Internship reward: yes

Location: Netherlands (Amsterdam office)

If you are interested in an EY Blockchain internship, do not hesitate to contact us for more information. Contact details: Thomas Rondeel (thomas.rondeel@nl.ey.com) or Francesco Lelli.

Note: Based on performance to be decided if student’s contract is prolonged after the graduation. In other words EY is committed to your success and to your career. If you will do a good job they will be happy to keep you around! 

Note 2: EY support the idea of publishing the outcome of the research conducted in the thesis. This activity can be in the form of a scientific publication and eventually part of the work can be of a patent for proper safeguard of the intellectual property. These opportunities will be reviewed on a case per case basis.

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