Routines for Master Thesis Projects

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1 Introduction

This document is a practical guide how master thesis projects shall be conducted within the ForSyDe (Ingo Sander) and Real-time (Matthias Becker) groups at KTH. Some of the suggestions might not be mandatory for a master thesis according to the KTH rules and should then be viewed more as recommendations. The main idea of this document is to help the student during the process of the master thesis project and to also clarify the expectations from examiner and supervisor.

The document shall be viewed as a living document and will be updated when clarifications are needed or new suggestions shall be included.

2 General KTH/EECS Information and Rules

The general rules for a master thesis at KTH and EECS are valid and shall be followed. For master thesis projects in 2023, please consult the following web page: Degree Projects at EECS. All submissions should be done via this page. However, please also send an e-mail including the submission to both supervisor and examiner, where you also state that you have submitted your document in Canvas.

Please also carefully check the document Comprehensive guidelines for degree project courses, common goals and assessment criteria, which describes both the pass and fail criteria at KTH for the different degree project courses. You find the grading criteria for the master thesis projects on page 4 of this document.

3 Additional Routines and Suggestions

In general, we follow the main steps and assignments. However, we strongly encourage that the master thesis student shall do an oral presentation in connection with the 'pre-study', which we then view as 'intermediate report' and 'intermediate presentation'. We also encourage that students doing the thesis project in the ForSyDe group act as opponent for one intermediate report. The idea is to learn from each other and to give useful feedback at an early stage of the master thesis project.

In addition, we encourage that master thesis students submit a time plan after two weeks and send a bi-weekly short status report every second week during the master thesis project as plain e-mail.

The following plan assumes that the thesis project starts in week 3 and ends in week 23, taking several 'red days' into account.

3.1 Time Plan

The time plan shall help the student to keep track of the progress during the master thesis. The time should be delivered after two weeks of the thesis project. It should use weeks as time unit and should contain at least the following items:

Final project proposal (Assignment: Individual plan) (after two weeks): The idea is that the student has a clearly better understanding of the master thesis project after two weeks and can formulate clearer mandatory and optional goals for the thesis project.
- Note: The deadline is scheduled for Monday, January 30.
Intermediate report (Assignment: Pre-study) (after 8 weeks): The intermediate report shall be the result of the literature study and cover the introduction, background, related work, the methodology chapters, and shall give the structure for the final report. Thus, the intermediate report shall follow the same template as the final report and evolve into the final report. The intermediate report shall be very carefully written as if it would be the final report, and carefully check language (spelling and grammar), layout, and references. The better the report is, the better feedback can be given.
- Note: The deadline is scheduled for Monday, March 13.
Presentation of the intermediate report (in week 10): The intermediate report shall be presented. The student should have the final presentation already in mind where a large part of the presentation and the slides can be reused. It is strongly recommended to put effort on the intermediate presentation, which also will usually result in better feedback.
- Note: The presentation is scheduled for Thursday, March 23 or Friday, March 24.
Final report (Assignment: Thesis) (in week 19): The final report shall be final, i.e. the student delivers a report that has been carefully checked for language, layout, content and references. The examiner will read this report and assess it for grading.
- Note: The student should send a very good draft version to the supervisor in good time (about 3 weeks before the deadline of the final report), so that the supervisor has sufficient time to provide feedback on the report.
- Note: The deadline is scheduled for Monday, May 29.
Self-Evaluation (Assignment: Self-Evaluation) (in week 19 or 20): The student conducts the self-evaluation according to the KTH-template.
Final presentation (Assignment: Presentation) (in week 20): The student will give a presentation of the master thesis project. The duration of the presentation shall be 20 minutes, so that there is time for questions and a further discussion.
- Note: The presentation is scheduled for Thursday, June 8 or Friday, June 9.

The following assignments are not part of the time plan, but should be done as soon as possible, but not later than week 19, so that all assignments for the thesis are completed after the presentation:

Assignments 'Active Listening 1' and 'Active Listening 2'
Assignment 'Opposition'

The time plan shall be submitted together with the 'Final project proposal' (Assignment: Individual plan) in Canvas.

3.2 Bi-weekly Status Reports

The bi-weekly status report shall contain the following headers:

Achievements during the last two weeks
Plans for the next two weeks
Deviation from the time plan and unforeseen problems

4 General recommendations

If possible, write the report in \(\LaTeX\). You can use Overleaf, but for larger documents, it is often better to simply use an editor or \(\LaTeX\) IDE and run \(\LaTeX\) locally on your computer. If you write your report in \(\LaTeX\), you can also use \(\LaTeX\) for the final presentation using the Beamer package.
Use KTH GitHub for version control not only for source code, but also when you write the report.
Start writing from the very first day!

5 Role of Examiner and Supervisor

The role of examiner and supervisor are defined by KTH. They do not actively contribute to the thesis, but have different roles to ensure the quality of the thesis project. The student performs the individual work of the master degree project, where knowledge, methodology and skills gained in the master's programme has to be applied. The supervisor from KTH follows the process.