We had research project planning last semester leading up to the master thesis during the last semester. This page is for collecting important information about the progress.

Seminars

• Seminar 1
  
• Seminar 2
  

The course description says we shall:

• Independently (but guided) define a significant and complex research and development problem.
  
• Analyze existing literature (theories, methods..)
  
• Plan and conduct studies or experiments and analyze the collected data. The goal is "new" knowledge.
  
• Document the result.
  

In short, we shall define a problem, review the literature, design some sort of experiment and analyze the findings. The findings should be new knowledge, meaning taking data and transforming it into knowledge. Knowledge is the result of decisions, meaning answering the question(s) we defined and give recommendations.

Both the written report (80%) and oral presentation (20%) will be graded. The work is supervised and a contract must be written by the 20th of January.

On Fronter we have a page "IMT4904" with the following information of the deadlines 2014:

• Jan 9th: First seminar
  
• Jan 20th: Hand in signed contract with supervisor and deliver abstract for HiG web.
  
• (Feb 1st: Deadline for studweb registration)
  
• April 10th: Second seminar
  
• (May 1st: Deadline for exam registration)
  
• June 1st: Deliver final report
  
• June 16-20th: Oral presentations
  

When plotting these dates in a spreadsheet it is obviously more time available in the spring semester. 22 versus 17. This means an average working week of 40 hours should add up to 900 hours or 30 ECTS.

Requirements for deliveries:

• The report: There are percentages on the different parts of the report. The two most heavy ones (45%) are state of the art overview and the contribution: being able to perform scientific work using a methodology to gather and analyze data.
  
• The presentation is short, about 20 minutes. It shall answer what was performed, why, why you found out (your contributions) and your conclusion. It is followed by questions and be prepared to defend your conclusions. Keep in mind the scientific fallacies from lecture 3.
  

My thesis

Things to do

• Fine tune the research questions and method (write abstract to supervisor)
  
• Continue writing the literature review
  
• Read more previous master thesis