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 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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If you are enrolled in the other 50% of the universities, your (candidate) supervisor can’t assign you a thesis directly but you need to find and propose a topic that will be evaluated and, if properly presented, it will become your thesis.  

Both these approaches (with thesis proposal or without thesis proposal) have merits and problems. I am not going to take a particular side. At the same time, if you have to write a research proposal I will give you a few suggestions in order to “make it fly” so that you will not have to write it over and over again.

You can consider a thesis proposal as a 2-3 pages document that describes what could be your argument of the thesis. Usually, there is not a strict format or a proposed template. However, you may want to ask to your thesis coordinator or your student office in order to be sure. 

All you have to do is to provide a small description of your idea and propose something that is feasible and original.  Nothing more and nothing less.

A good thesis proposal has 4 elements:

• The idea
• The methodology
• The tool
• The data

Let’s see them one at the time.

The idea:

Capture in 2 sentences what you would like to investigate. Maybe you would like to use a neural network for evaluating the possibility of predicting the financial distress of a company. Alternatively, you would like to investigate how companies adopt a particular cloud computing solution. Just use your fantasy and your curiosity. At the same time start thinking to who could be a possible supervisor that will be interested in this particular topic.

The methodology:

How would you like to investigate the idea that you are proposing? Sometimes is easy, think about the first example that I made in the previous paragraph. “Neural network” is part of the idea itself and clearly suggest a methodology. At the same time, some ideas require additional specification. In the second case, for example, you are not specifying how you intend to evaluate the adoption of a cloud computing solution. If that is the case, you have to make explicit what you intend to do. Maybe you will survey executives in several companies, maybe you will conduct interviews, maybe you will look at financial data and so on.

The tool:

Now that idea is clear and the methodology is explicit is about doing what you are proposing. In other words, what tool will you be using for your investigation? Continuing with the first example, maybe you will use a particular library (for example TensorFlow) and you will build a prototype using a programming language (for example JAVA or Python). In the second case, assuming that you will conduct a survey, you will use excel or R for analyze the data and some web tool for distributing questionnaire.

It does not really matter what you plan to use as long as is feasible, you can picture yourself doing what you are proposing for the next months and is a good fit your particular case of investigation (i.e. your idea).

The Data:

Now that you have a tool, what data will you use for validating or invalidating the claims that you will be making in your thesis? In the first example, you may want to consider some financial data-set that is publicly (or not) available. Alternatively, maybe you can see if researchers use a particular benchmark and model your thesis around that idea. In the second example, if you will be survey practitioners, you will actually build the data set that you plan to analyze.

As you can see these 4 arguments are interlinked and influence each other. (i) Can you build a thesis around a neural network if you do not have data set? (ii) Can you analyze a survey if you do not have access to people that are actually working at that particular topic? (iii) Can you build a prototype if you are not familiar with programming? The more these 4 aspects will be clear the more they will marge in a flawless manner. In other words the more you want to show that you ideas is original and feasible the more you have to seek a way to integrate these 4 aspects in the proposal. This is the secret of a well written proposal!

One more tip for your thesis proposal:

There is only one remaining aspect that we need to consider. Your work do not exist in isolation but is part of a particular discipline and you must show that you are aware of what others are doing in a similar context. As general rule, you have to propose something that is relatively original. However, at the same time, it does not have to be a “game changer”. The chances that someone else is doing (or did) something similar is quite high and you want to cite a few scientifically relevant works of other researcher in the field. At the same time, you want to specify where your work will be similar and where it will differ. For example, you may want to use a similar approach (Neural Network) on a different set of data that is richer or more precise/imprecise compared to the one that other authors are using. Alternatively, maybe the problem of cloud adoption has been used only via interview and you are proposing a similar investigation but with a different methodology (a survey for example).

For this investigation, google scholar is what you need. Just find 4-8 scientific articles that are relevant and spend 1 or 2 paragraphs discussing similarities or differences.

In summary, a thesis proposal is a combination of an idea, a methodology, few tools and data. What you are proposing in these 4 categories should integrate smoothly. At the same time you need to spend some time to investigate if other authors have done something similar. You need to do that for both, use their work as a source of inspiration and ensure some novelty of your approach.

How to write a #thesis #proposal or a #research proposal: a few tips and suggestions
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This article (How to write a thesis proposal or a research proposal: a few tips) is part of the miniseries on how to do a good thesis, you can see the full list of posts at the following links:

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli 

Volunteer computing is a type of distributed computing in which computer owners donate their computing resources (such as processing power and storage) to one or more “projects”. Successful applications that adopted this technique include SETI@Home [1] and Folding@home [2] 

Toward this idea in this project the candidate will design and implement a generic Workflow plug-in for accessing one of the popular volunteer computing middleware.

The software that will be targeted in this project are JOpera [3] as workflow system and ExtremeWebCH [4] as volunteer computing middleware. At the end of the project a working prototype is expected. 
The purpose of this work is to evaluate the status of the art of these developments proposing new architecture and design guidelines. In addition the candidate will contribute to existing open source projects in order to improve the present tools.

Knowledge and Skills:

Web Programming, Java Programming and basic knowledge of Distribute Applications. 

References:

[1] SETI@Home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SETI@home
[2] Folding@home: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home 
[3] JOpera http://www.jopera.org/ 
[4] ExtremeWebCH http://www.xtremwebch.net/ 

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli 

In the coming 10 years not only computers will be connected to the Internet but also small and heterogeneous devices will be part of the web too. These devices will support people in carrying their everyday life activities. This trends is known as Internet of Things.

Toward this idea in this project the candidate will design and implement a generic controller for an embedded device i.e he/she will produce Web APIs for Instruments and Devices. Moreover this control system should expose its APIs in the web in order to allow remote access to the resource. The device that will be targeted in this project is the Lego Mindstorm robot [1] and at the end of the project a working prototype is expected.

In the past year libraries and framework have been proposed for the control of the Lego chip. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the status of the art of these developments proposing new architecture and design guidelines. In addition the candidate will contribute to existing open source project in order to improve the present tools. 

The candidate will use: 

• A Lego Mindstorm [1]
• The Lejos [2] library in order to access and control of the robot using java APIs.
• The Instrument Element [3] tools for exposing Web Service APIs.
• Any tool that she knows for the realization of a user interface.

The candidate can choose any configuration of the robot that she prefer such as car, arm, walking robot etc. She also will choose the User Interface according to the selected configuration. 

In this video an example of prototype is presented: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8VvTENzPGI 
This is just an example; the candidate is encouraged to propose a different prototype. 

Knowledge and Skills:

Web Programming, Java Programming and basic knowledge of Distribute Applications and Embedded Devices. 

References:

[1] Lego Mindstorm NXT: https://shop.lego.com/en-US/category/mindstorms
[2] Lejos Project: http://lejos.sourceforge.net/ 
[3] Instrument Element Project: http://instrumentelem.sourceforge.net/ 

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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 

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Mentor: Francesco Lelli

This thesis is about trying to answering the following questions: “what is a good research paper?” or “is this publication worth reading?” before reading the paper.

Nowadays the amount of scientific journals is overwhelming and constantly increasing. Students, as well as senior scientists, are facing an impossible amount of information to elaborate. Consequently, they are force to apply a set of heuristics for selecting the information to process and consume. This approach force the scholar in forming an opinion prior a proper read of the scientific article. This is “by definition” a bias that may be misleading.

You will investigate how scholars implement in an explicit or implicit manner these heuristics.  You will also devise best practices and computer driven tools that could help improve the efficiency of the selection process of scientific articles.

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

• Read this article about my personal heuristics for understanding if a paper is worth reading.
• A generic article in Wikipedia about Heuristics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristics_in_judgment_and_decision-making
• A few keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Heuristics and Bias, Heuristics in decision making, Heuristics in information management, Heuristics in software engineering.

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.

You may propose a qualitative or quantitative approach for validating the claims that you will be making in your thesis.

The ideal candidate is a self started go-getter student that like to see things thru and do not limit himself to take facts for granted.

If this topic trigger your intellectual curiosity, just get in touch with me

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Mentor: Bert-Jan Butijn, Second Reader: Francesco Lelli

Blockchain technology (BCT), also referred to as distributed ledger technology, is currently regarded as one of the most important technological developments. The locus of this pervasive technology is the increasing attention towards deploying blockchain technology to carry out transactions during business processes. Transactions that are carried out during a business process can be executed in a more effective and secure fashion, using the beneficial properties of blockchain technology such as the transparency (tamperproof) and immutability of transaction records stored on the blockchain.

Because of these properties, BCT offers a way to execute processes in a trustworthy manner even in a network without any mutual trust between nodes. Furthermore, the parties involved in the transaction can rely on the blockchain technology to guarantee that transactions are carried out and transaction records can be regarded as trustworthy, there is no longer a need for a trusted third party to carry out these transactions.

The absence of a third party in a process reduces the transaction costs between parties because there is no brokerage fee that needs to be paid for handling the transaction. As such, BCT offers the potential of faster business process execution whilst greatly reducing compliance costs. Therefore the adoption of BCT for business processes could accumulate to a significant reduction of costs for firms. Yet, little is known about the full strategic potential of BCT.

For your master thesis we expect you to study this strategic potential. This means that you will be conducting interviews at various firms that are currently using BCT, or are in the phase of exploring its strategic potential. We expect that you have some prior experience with, and skills in conducting interviews. Besides these skills you speak and write fluent English.

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.

For More information contacts:

Bert-Jan Butijn or Francesco Lelli.

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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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