This was the last of 4 sessions. The goal was to go through how the master thesis report should be written and how it is evaluated. We also did some repetition on how the pre project planning report should look like.

The master thesis is a technical (scientific) report and shall answer:

• What was the motivation of the work?
  
• What are relevant related works?
  
• What activities were performed (by the writer) and why?
  
• What was achieved?
  
• What can be concluded from it?
  

Structure:

• Title and authors page, affiliations and date: The title is the most read part of the report
  
• Preface (your personal spot)
  
• Table of contents, figures, tables etc
  
• Abstract (read the paper "A scrutiny of the abstract" by Kenneth K. Landes)
  
• Introduction: Review, claim and agenda (read the paper "A scrutiny of the introduction" by Jon F. Claerbout)
  
• Background: Relevant literature for the thesis, state of the art.
  
• Contribution (main part - your contribution: method, results and discussions)
  
• Conclusion and further work
  
• Acknowledgements (thanks to), references and appendices
  

Remember people read reports like this: Interesting title? go on. Interesting abstract? go on. Interesting conclusion? go on. Results?... Write these sections last so that they are correct and can sell what has been performed. High information density is important.

We discussed some ethical issues. Can be privacy of human test subjects and honest research.

Weighting:

• 5% Structure
  
• 10% Exposition
  
• 10% Definition of research problem
  
• 20% State of the art section
  
• 25% Analytical methods and results
  
• 10% Validity of conclusion
  

Pre project notes

Answer what, why, how and when. Since we lack experience in project planning (?) cut amount of work by a factor of 2-3. The project plan is for starting the process, and deviations will occur. Be specific, have measurable questions, be ambitious but realistic (a few months and very limited resources). Use milestones so that progress can be followed. The primary goal is to learn the process, not to invent quantum theory!