Mentor: Francesco Lelli

Co-Supervisor: Second Reader will be assigned based on the finalization of the proposal from the student.

What is the value of your website for an SME or a professional service? Internet as a selling channel is a vastly explored domain. However, a set of business may not have a direct benefit from this channel as they require a more personal touch or are intrinsically “offline businesses”. That is the case of babysitters, lawyers, tailors, thinkers, property managers, cleaners, etc. These professions may advertise their presence in Internet; however, most of the relationship evolve offline in a personal manner.

This thesis proposal intends to evaluate and quantify the benefit of an online presence for such businesses and the effect that a public profile may have in establishing the trust that is needed to engage in a constructive relationship.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

Are you curious and would like to know more?

This video (courtesy of google) will give you an overview of the landscape:

Full list of videos available here:

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

• Watch some of the videos of the Digital Garage channel of Google. You will get familiar of the landscape
• A few non intuitive keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Consumer trust, internet presence, B2C, Offline Shopping, Social Presence, Online Shopping, Shopping Behavior.

Would you like to know how some scholars are approaching this problem? Here you can find some initial pointers for a more exhaustive research:

• The Determinants and Consequences of Consumer Trust in e-retailing: a conceptual Framework.
• Past purchase and intention to purchase in e‐commerce: The mediation of social presence and trust
• Exploring online and offline shopping motivational values in Malaysia
• Multi-channel consumer perceptions

Suggested methodology: you are probably going to build a survey

Tools: a non-exhaustive list of tools that you may want to consider using includes R, SPSS, Google Forms, Qualtrics, Excel, etc.

Data: you will build your own dataset and will give you the opportunity to take advantage of open science best practices.

If you are interested in the topic, do not hesitate to contact me for more information. Please contact Francesco Lelli.

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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!

The post Master Thesis Plus Talpa Internship Opportunities in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

• You do not know what you are doing. This is normal, after-all we are talking about research and is impossible to “jump into the unknown” knowing exactly what you have to do.
• You do not know what you are doing (version 2). This is less normal but happen often. If you are a first timer, the master, hasn’t prepare you in all the minor details of your sub-domain of research and you may need to compensate this by studying a bit on your own.
• You are subject to the shiny object syndrome. Again, this is normal. You are human and as human we are attracted to “new things”. This aspects may play against you in this phase as you are risking to jump on too many things without investigate deeply in any.

Factors that may #Prevent you in #Advance towards the #research aspect of your #thesis
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Start by recognizing these aspects in yourself. Make sure to put some attention on what you are doing and on your thinking process. Over time you should be able to recognize these aspects and how they are effecting you when approaching to doing your thesis.

What follows is a step by step process that can help you in “putting your first foot out of the door” and leverage the literature review that you are probably already doing, followed by “a quick reading technique”. If you read the article on how to read a paper quickly and effectively you know that I always suggest to start by asking yourself “why should I read this paper”. If properly used, this approach can help you in this stage in several ways starting from the fact that you are trying to put some order into “the chaos of what you are reading”. But there is more; let’s start by considering the following categorizations:

• Objective. What is the problem that the authors are trying to solve?
• Methodology. What is the approach that authors are using for validating their research hypothesis?
• (sub)Domain. What is the expertise of the authors and from what angle are approaching the problem?
• Tools. What technique is used by the authors and what software is adopted for doing the “hands on aspect” of their research?
• Data. What kind of data set is used by the authors, are they proposing or adopting a standard benchmark for evaluating certain aspects of their research?
• Proximity to the problem that you are addressing. How is the article that you are reading related to your problem? Maybe it is trying to address something similar or maybe it is addressing something different but the approach of the authors could be useful for your case.

Possible ways to categorize a #scientific #paper for helping you during your #research
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Categorization is the first step on how to use the literature review for your research. Every thesis must contain a literature review part, normally in chapter 2 or chapter 3. I recommend you to take note of these aspects and to summarize them using one or more tables. This will give completeness to your work. In particular it will shows that you haven’t only read a few articles but that you are capable to navigate the landscape of cutting edge literature that is around the problem that you are trying to solve.

You are also welcome to propose your own categorization. Different domains will probably have some particularity that can’t be easily generalized. Nevertheless, let’s see how we could use each one of the categories for addressing the particular problem that is related to our thesis.

Finally, please note, that when you are approaching a literature review you should “remove your ego from the equation”. In other words, you are looking at the work of others and you want to be as objective as possible in evaluating it. It is not about your problem and your research questions; it is about their problems and the solutions that are proposing. Your objective is to understand and categorize. There will be plenty of room for expressing your opinion and your ideas in other parts and phases of your thesis.

1: Objective and Proximity to the problem that you are addressing:

This is probably the most strait forward of the proposed categorizations. When addressing a scientific problem you probably have a particular objective in mind. You are considering a literature review for helping you in specifying the problem further and/or you would like to evaluate possible solutions that have been proposed.

You want to categorize the work of others, taking into account, that aspect in mind. In particular considering if the work of the authors may be relevant or not. A reasonable categorization should consider the following aspects:

• Is the work of the authors trying to solve the same problem that you are? In other words you have the same objective of the authors.
• Is the problem a subset or a super-set of your objective? I.e. you are aiming at an objective that is smaller or bigger.
• Is the objective of the authors similar to yours but developed in a different domain? For example, you are both interested in improving the speed of delivery but you are focusing on door to door milk distribution and the authors are considering newspapers.

This categorization will help you in understating who is trying to solve a similar problem. You will also have a feeling of the level of deepness of their analysis. Finally, you will know and what has been already done in your area of research. As your goal is not to replicate the work of others but to propose (and evaluate) an innovative idea, this will help you in preparing and clarifying the landscape where your future work will be positioned.

This is the first categorization that will help you reasoning around how to use the literature review for your research.

Try to #understand what you are doing by looking at the objectives of other #Researchers. Devise analogies and differences.
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2: Methodology

This approach for categorizing relevant works suggests to forget completely about the objective and to focus “on the how”. There is not a single way to solve a problem and probably each author is specialized in a adopting different techniques. Consequently, different works will approach the problem using different methods. For example they may propose a Qualitative or Quantitative approach and within that type they may focus on something different.

Let me clarify with an example and lets’s consider the problem of predicting the weather. In this case the problem is clear and well defined but each researcher may have different approaches in proposing a solution:

• Maybe they are asking to 10 different groundhogs their opinion,
• Or are considering to model the data that they have using linear regression,
• Maybe are using a <Insert Your Favorite AI technique here> for building a predictor.
• Alternatively they are just focusing on a sub-problem like, for example, on the quality of the data that their sensors are collecting.

As you may imagine the list of possible methodologies can become very big. However, each domain of research has their “preferred styles” for solving their challenges. In practice you will find that authors tend to focus on a subset of 1-10 different approaches. This is due to the fact that researchers are humans and their knowledge is specialized.

If you want to understand how to use the literature review for your research a categorization regarding the methodologies used by researchers is an important aspect.

Look at the methodologies that other #Researchers are using. It may help you in finding one that you useful for you as well.
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3: (Sub) Domain of Expertise

As anticipated in the previous section, researchers are humans and they approach a problem with their expertise. Some problems (usually the most fun) transcend a single domain and are called “multidisciplinary”. If the problem that you are considering is in this category you want first to clarify with your supervisor a few aspects of your research. In particular you may want to be sure that your research question(s) are focus enough and not too broad. Topics like global warming or world poverty are fascinating problems but are a bit to ambitious to solve for a single thesis.

For the rest of this section I will assume that your research topic is narrow enough and has multidisciplinary aspects. Let’s, for example, consider the domain of “Internet of Things”, in particular the problem of “Privacy in Internet of Things“. Clearly this domain is analyzed by several types of researchers.

• Economists are trying to understand how these changes will impact businesses and the economy in general.
• Lawyers are considering regulatory aspects.
• Big Data Experts see this as an opportunity for collecting an analyzing data.
• Engineers are considering how to build new devices
• Computer Scientist focus on how to develop applications on top of that infrastructures
• Social Scientists study societal adoptions of these technologies

Each single expert is approaching the same problem from his/her own domain of expertise. Consequently you may find articles that are relevant but very different in therm of styles. If that is the case a categorization that take into account these dynamics can help you in understanding (and probably narrow down) your research questions and your future research.

Are your #problems multidisciplinary problems? Categorize the #literature review taking into account the various #discipline that are approaching the problem
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4: Tools

What are the tools that the researchers are using for solving the problem? Here I am explicitly not talking about the methodology. I am referring to tools and technology used in order to implement the validation of the research question. This categorization vary a lot in each domain of research. It can range from tools for building online surveys and questionnaires to software and/or libraries for implementing a particular proof of concept.

If you are considering more types of paper, i.e. papers that are using different methodologies, a single categorization maybe difficult to build. If that is the case you may want to consider a categorization per methodology that you are considering.

Let’s consider the example of Artificial Intelligence in particular, AI applied to weather prediction. You may find that researchers may focus, for example, in Neural Networks and in Data Mining techniques. If you want to survey both, you may want to consider two different tables. One dedicated to Neural Networks tools and the other to Data Mining tools.

If you are envisioning too many tables you may want to question the scope of your research. Check with your supervisor if your research question is focused enough.

#understanding the tools that are used by #Researchers can help you quantify the time that you will spend doing your #research. Thus #speeding the #learning curve
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5: Data

What information are the researchers using for validating their work? Many of the considerations and concerts that we made for the “Tools” category also apply here. In particular, if you find yourself considering several different types of data you may want to question the scope of the research. Typical sub-categorization of this categories includes:

• Data from questionnaires and/or surveys.
• Data collected from a physical device and/or use case.
• Simulations.
• Use of standard data-set known and accepted among researchers.
• Data collected from a particular company.

Categorize the data used by researchers will help you understand how you can use yours and is an important aspect of how to use the literature review for your research.

Look at your #data in an objective way. Can they be used as the validation of your your #scientific #claims ? What are other #Researchers using?
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Wrap up: How to use the literature review for your research?

I am sure that these categorizations, as well as, the one that you will suggest are typical of your particular domain of research and will improve the quality of your literature review. However, this is not the point of the article. The goals is “to move forward” towards a successful experimental research.

How to use the literature review for your research? My suggestion is the following:

• Reflect around the Objectives of the researchers and consider if you would like to be doing something similar. Try to understand analogies and differences and what “they are proposing” and what “you would like to do”.
• Use the Sub-Domain of Expertise for reflecting around the scope of your thesis. Decide the angle that you are more knowledgeable for approaching the problem.
• Shop around for Methodologies, find the one that resonate more with you. After-all, you will have to follow it in detail for the coming months.
• Play with the Tools that are normally used by the researchers for validating the particular methodology that you selected. This will give you some mutuality for elaborating the practical part of your research.
• Ask yourself if the tool that you are considering is a good match with the Data that you are collecting or you have at your disposal.

This is how to use literature review for your research. If you start reflecting on all these aspects you will have a lot of questions in your mind. That is perfectly normal, and if you succeed in organizing your thoughts around these 5 categories you will have a clear objective in a well defined domain. In addition, you will have a methodology and a tool to use for analyzing your data.

If you find yourself with more question then answers. Try to organize your thoughts around the 5 mentioned categories. This will break down the problem in more digestible pieces such as:

• Is my objective clear enough?
• How deep do I know the methodology that I would like to apply?
• Are the data that I have good for the methodology that I would like to use for validating my results?
• Am I capable of using that particular tool? How much time will take me to learn it?
• Is the tool adequate for been used in conjunction with my data?

The goal is to find an objective that is achievable and can be evaluated with a sound methodology in the time-frame of your thesis.

You may want to take note off all your ideas and discuss them with your supervisor as some of them may be too ambitious or not sufficiently specified.

Use a #Literature review for #understanding what you are doing in the context of your #research. A proper categorization can help you in learning from #OTHERS
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This article (How to use the literature review for your research) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:

If you like what you read, consider sharing it!

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

Co-Supervisor Emiel Caron  

Machines are better than human in executing repetitive and computational oriented tasks. However, humans are more flexible and can conceptualize and categorize information in a superior way. The candidate will investigate the proper way to combine both the world in the domain of categorization algorithm.

You will focus these studies in the domain of scientometrics, in particular the identification of duplicate scientific references in the patent databases (see this article for more information).

Strings representing references will be adjusted following a similarity algorithm that you will contribute to develop. This particular algorithm that will be partially “human driven”.   

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

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

• A generic article in Wikipedia about Microwork https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwork
• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: ESP Game, string similarity, microwork, gamification.
• A few resources for a practical understanding of the tools that may be used: https://www.microworkers.com https://www.mturk.com/
• Zhao, Kangran, Caron, Emiel, & Guner, Stanislaw (2016). Large scale disambiguation of scientific references in patent databases. In Ismael Rafols, Jordi Molas-Gallart, Elena Castro-Martinez, & Richard Woolley (Eds.), Proceedings of 21st International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators (STI 2016): Peripheries, frontiers and beyond (pp. 1404-1410). València (Spain): Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València.

Note: Basic proficiency in a computer languages like JAVA and/or SQL plus the capability of consuming a Web APIs may be beneficial.

If you are interested in the topic, do not hesitate to contact us for more information. Our contact details are: Emiel Caron & Francesco Lelli.

The post Human enhanced machine driven categorization: Thesis Proposal appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

Mentor: Francesco Lelli 

Grid/ Cloud computing offers to their users a virtually unlimited computational infrastructure. Users usually interact with this system using a command line interface thus limiting its use to people that are familiar with computers. The goal of the thesis is to expose similar functionality using Web based APIs thus exposing Grid functionalities to a larger audience. 
The candidate will design and implement this APIs offering functionality like: (i) user authentication; (ii) job submission; (iii) data transfer; (iv) job monitoring and notification. Moreover it will validate the quality of his design choices implementing a Facebook or a WordPress plug-in. 

During this thesis the candidate will have the opportunity to contribute to existing open source projects in order to improve the present tools and enable them with interfaces for Web 2.0 APIs for Grid Computing

Knowledge and Skills:

Web Programming, Java Programming and basic knowledge of Distributed Systems. 

Where to know more:

Read this introduction about cloud computing and looks at the following references:

[1] GridComputing:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_computing
[2] REST: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer 
[3] Facebook APIs http://developers.facebook.com/ 
[4] WordPress plugin http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin 

The post Web 2.0 APIs for Grid Computing: Thesis Proposal appeared first on Francesco Lelli.

If that is the alternative some heuristics may guide you in forming an opinion prior reading a scientific paper. This opinion is “by definition” a bias and you should be aware that may be misleading. In other words, you will answer to the question “what is a good research paper?” or “is this publication worth reading?” before reading the paper.

First of all, there is not a magic answer to these questions. A most heuristics for assessing the quality of a publication will have flaws.

A good publication is a publication that adds value to what you are trying to achieve. There is no escape, you first have to read the article and then judge it on your own. Both Einstein and Shakespeare they had a moment in their life when they publish something and they had zero citation and zero positive review.

Nevertheless, let’s consider the following heuristics:

• (i) Is the abstract scientifically sound? Is it formulating an hypothesis? Is it summarizing the performed experiment(s) for validating the hypothesis?  If the answer is no. Well you may be suspicious.
• (ii) Does the article has citations?Obviously, the newer it is the less citations is going to have. However, a lot of citations just imply that the article has been mentioned by colleagues and nothing about the reason why.
• (iii) How citations are distributed over the time? A lot of citations right after the article was published and nothing over the years may indicate that finding are no longer of interest of the research community. Alternatively, the ideas may have been replaced by a “a better one”.
• (iv) Do Authors keep citing their previous works? If that is the case the article may be just a small increment of an existing idea already published and you may want to go directly to “its origin”.
• (v) Is the author known among the research community? You should always think with your own head, however some people are known for been very productive researchers and this may serve you as a shortcut.
• (vi) is the journal/conference considered a good venue? Short answer: in this respect, probably your department (or University or Research Institute) maintains a list of Journal that are considered of “good quality”. These are a list of venue that your “local scientific community” consider respectable. Obviously this list is not exhaustive but can be a starting point.

6 Heuristics for Assessing the Quality of a Publication
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These are 6 heuristics for assessing the quality of a publication. However, a long answer to the point (vi) requires some understanding on how scientific venues (such as journals and conferences) work and I will make a dedicated article on the topic.

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First of all let’s start with what you achieved so far and congratulation for reaching this stage in your studies! This implies that you have a (more or less) clear idea on what you would like to do at the end of your thesis/studies and that you have a thesis topic that is triggering your curiosity and you would like to know more about. If that is not the case you may want to read this article that suggests you how to take the most from your thesis. Also, please note, this is not instructions on “how to write your thesis” but limits itself in the preparatory work that you need to do before start working at your thesis.

When interacting with your supervisor you have to understand the following:

• He/She is probably mentoring several students at the same time.
• He/She is probably more busy then should be and is probably dedicating  50-60 hours/week to his/her job.
• He/She maybe doing other things like teaching and research while supervising you.

Consequently, without a proper set of communication tools with your thesis supervisor, your email may be “lost in the chaos”. He/she may not read your emails and attachments with various version of your thesis may just “contribute to the noise”. On the other hand, if you will make an effort in keeping the material that you plan to share with him/her ordered, he/she may be able to quickly follow what you are doing and the majority of the time that you will spend together will be actually spent in improving the state of your thesis.

Improve your #mentorship experience: setting up proper #communication #tools with your #thesis's supervisor allow you to optimize the time that you will spend with your #mentor
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Sharing a folder is one of the best communication tools with your thesis supervisor that I was able find. Obviously, the tool itself is not sufficient and how you will structure the material inside plays a crucial role as well. Probably this is not new to you and you may have your own way to do that: maybe using Google Drive, Dropbox, SharePoint etc. However, you want to check if and how your supervisor currently operating because, as he/she is probably supervising several students at the same time, adopting one system for each student is simply unmanageable. What follows is what I usually recommend to my students. I personally use Dropbox but these recommendations can be easily generalized.

Why did I choose Dropbox? Because is free and I like the idea of having a folder that is the same in every computer that I use. In case you do not have an account this is an invitation link https://db.tt/ALnJBcdQ that will give you 250 MB of free space on top of the 2-5 GB that you will normally have. Nevertheless, let me say again that this is just how I personally operate and is important that you will check with your supervisor how he/she would like to set up the proper communication tools with you!

Communication tools with your thesis supervisor step by step

Step 1: Download and install Dropbox in the computer that you will use for your thesis.

Step 2: Create a shared folder in Dropbox. The title of the folder should have your name and the word “thesis” in it, so that it will not be confusing with potential others.  It like having a normal folder in your computer with the exception that will be shared with your supervisor. In other words every time you will change the files inside the folder your supervisor will see it and you will see the changes that he/she will make as well.

Step 3: Invite your supervisor to the shared folder. Just ask for your supervisor’s Dropbox id and follow the proper procedure.

Step 3:  Create the following structure into the folder.

• Articles: will contains all the scientific articles that you will be reading and you believe are relevant to your thesis.
• Data: if your thesis will be collecting data. This folder will contain information on how the data are structured and the data
• Thesis-Proposal: you probably had to write a thesis proposal to pitch for an internship and/or to validate your preliminary idea. This folder should contains “everything that you have done” before starting the thesis.
• Presentations: relevant PowerPoint presentation.
• Chapter-1: You probably are not going to write your thesis “all in once”. If you will break the thesis in chapters you will have the possibility to finalize once chapter and ask to your supervisor for an early feedback.
• Chapter-2: see chapter 1 comment.
• Chapter-N: yep, as many as you need. I guess the last one should be conclusions
• Appendix: in case you plan to have multiple appendixes consider adding sub-folders into this folder
• Final-Thesis: should contains your “final draft” and your camera ready thesis.

The structure should be as self-explanatory as possible. Obviously, you are welcome to arrange the folder in the way you prefer and to add other sub-folders. Nevertheless, this is the minimum structure that I would like you to consider and always (did I said always? let’s do it again: always) agree with your supervisor on the proper structure. You think that you are sharing folder but in practice you are sharing “mental categories” with him/her.

Final remarks

Setting up the proper communication tools with your thesis supervisor in the end will save you time and will allow a more effective communication. Communication will probably happen via email and/or Skype; nevertheless, you can always point to the shared folder for additional explanation: “I just finished chapter 2, can you please have a look?”. “I found this article in google scholar, is it really relevant?”. “What do you think about visualizing the data in this way?”etc.

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Let’s start from a step back. Instead of start from a research topic, ask yourself the following question:

“What would you like to do when you will grow up?”

Is a difficult question and you have infinite possibilities but let’s simplify it and consider the following 3 categories:

• (i) Are you planning to look for a job in a company?
• (ii) Would you like to become an entrepreneur and start your own company?
• (iii) Are you consider an academic career?

The idea is that you will tune the thesis for your objectives and you will use it for helping you in advancing your goals.

Let’s consider the first case (i). If you would like to join a company, your first priority should not be the thesis itself but finding a proper and relevant internship. The thesis will be part of the internship itself and you will discuss it with both your supervisor and your mentor at the company that will offer you the internship. Whatever you are planning now is not relevant as your mentor will have his/her opinions and your work should be integrated in their activities.

At the same time, your thesis will be an opportunity for “putting a foot into the door”, test the working environment, understand if this is what you really want to do for the next years and, obviously, prove yourself as a valuable asset for the company.

Once you will graduate, if you decide for a different company, this experience will be valuable and your CV will have something that will help you stand from the crowd.

In the case you would like to become an entrepreneur (case ii), you want to first join an incubator and/or a business network meet, your new friends and colleagues and, only after, seek for an entrepreneurial supervisor that is willing to discuss a possible thesis that can help you validate/disqualify some of your entrepreneurial ideas. Instead of focusing to writing a sound proposal you should focus on identify your “target professor” as early as possible and involve him/her in a discussion that will lead to your research proposal.  An internship is “neutral”; some may help you acquire new skills but at the same time you will be working at someone else projects and you will spend your time not focusing in finding your own path.

Finally, in the case of an academic career (iii), your goal should be to pursue a PhD; anything that you will be doing before joining a PhD program will not be really relevant for your future academic career. Consequently, all your activities should be focusing in “getting points” for being accepted in one. Your thesis can help you in that more than you think. An easy way to stand out from the crowd is understanding the scientific method and make a thesis that has potential for been published in a scientific journal. In choosing your supervisor, you want to focus on one that is currently doing research in an area that you believe is interesting and you can potentially picture yourself investigating it for the next 3-4 years.

Use your #thesis for kick start your #Careers and differentiate yourself from the crowd. #careeradvice
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Once what you want to do when you will grow up is clear you will find that to take the most from your thesis is relatively easy to achieve. You should also be ready to have a constructive discussion with your potential supervisor and you can choose the one that is more compatible with your character and what you would like to do in the future.

Yes, I said “compatible with your character”; in the end, both students and professors are human beings and do what they do following “their own style”: you want to be sure that you are compatible otherwise, you risk to waste time that you can spend somewhere else.

In case you are considering me as a possible mentor for your thesis I invite you to read this post first.

This article ( Take the Most from Your Thesis ) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of post at the following links:

The post Take the Most from Your Thesis appeared first on Francesco Lelli.