Most important messages today was: Start early (now) finding a topic and a supervisor. The first hours were spent talking about what the master thesis was all about, and the role of this project planning course. The final delivery this semester is a report, based on the template in the Fronter room. The final report is to be delivered to Hilde Bakke. Research at this level is about finding and documenting new knowledge and sharing it. Simply creating a program (engineering) can be turned into applied research by studying it (or a prototype) for performance, user experiences or similar. Applied research is is compared with pure research something that has a value now, while pure research often studies things just because they are unknown in general and might be useful in the future.

Finding a topic can be difficult, but the important factors to add are:

• Your interest: probably based on what you are studying, what tracks and subjects you have chosen.
  
• Your skills: Choose something you are good at. Like programming?, abstract math?, In depth interviews? Software testing etc.
  
• Topics of interest of the professors: they presented their ideas at the end of this seminar, and to be continued the next seminars.
  1. Steven: -
     
  2. Sule: -
     
  3. Slobodan: IDS search algorithms and event correlation on missing data
     
  4. Katrin: Link physical evidence with digital, Visualize "big data" by determining the needs
     
  
  
• It must be realistic. Work for half a year, including writing the report, perhaps doing testing and development. Must be narrow (and small) enough to manage it.
  

Anyway, research should be

• News worthy, meaning something new
  
• Be valid long term, opposite of finding a vulnerability in version x of software y
  
• Commercial interest is a bonus (but not a requirement)
  

Chapter 1:
The topic and it's description, what the problem is and what research questions you propose to answer the problem. Justification of the problem is also an important part here together with the planned contribution. Why would anyone pay for this research to be done and what can they expect the output to be (except from a bunch of paper).

Chapter 2:
Introduce the context around the problem, and description of the state of the art, basically get an overview of the field you are working in. Requires "library research".