Topic outline

  • General

    CONTACT: Jorma Laaksonen mailto:jorma.laaksonen@aalto.fi room B326 in CS building

    The course can be passed fully online.  The first and only lecture is on Wednesday 20.9.2023 14:15-15:00 in T6 and serves to answer the questions that the students have.

    The students will carry out a small research project under the supervision of one of the researchers from the Departments of Computer Science (Aalto SCI) and Information and Communications Engineering (Aalto ELEC), and in some cases by researchers outside the department, in the topics from machine learning, data science, and artificial intelligence. 

    The main purpose of this course is to provide you an experience to the practical research. Specifically, at the end of the course, you should be able to:

    • Focus and study deeper a research problem 
    • Search, find, and study related literature 
    • Collaborate with other researchers, be part of a research team 
    • Find out how theory works in practice 
    • Deal with uncertainty and frustration of not knowing the correct answer 
    • Communicate your results with presentations and reports 

    The available topics will be published on Wednesday 20.9.2023 before the lecture. A questionnaire for selecting/announcing the topics will be made available the same time. 


    CREDIT POINTS AND GRADING

    The number of credit units should reflect the effort in working hours so that 1 ECTS credit point matches 27 hours of work. The number of credit units is between 5 to 10,  the exact number will depend on the difficulty of the project and the workload. 10 ECTS projects are typically carried out during summer internships and 5 ECTS projects during the teaching semesterns. The number of credit units will be determined and the work will be graded by your supervisor.  

    The grade will reflect the quality of your work and your final report. Supervisors will be asked to grade according to following distribution:

    • Grade 5 (20%)
    • Grade 4 (40%)
    • Grade 3 (25%)
    • Grade 2 (10%)
    • Grade 1 (5%)

    The professors of the ELEC DICE department need the projects they supervise to be graded as  ELEC-E5541 Special Assignment.  Macadamia students can use that course to substitute CS-E4875 without further agreement.

    Please find the grading form for the supervisor here. 

    TOPICS
    • If you have been working as an intern or research assistant at the department, you can use your research work to pass the course. You can use your summer projects also if you have been a summer intern or trainee somewhere else. You should discuss the details (e.g., the number of credit points) with your supervisor. Note that you should not take credit units for the same project in another course and project cannot be used as a MSc thesis project although the MSc thesis project can be continuation of the research project. 
    • If you do not have a topic already and if you are seeking for a research topic, you can indicate those ones that interest you from the list of available topics.
    • If you already have or if you want to find or propose some other topic, you need to have or find a supervisor on your own.
    • The following professors in Macadamia did not provide topics for the list, but you can contact them directly if their research are interests you: Vikas Garg, Juho Kannala, Maarit Korpi-Lagg, Heikki Mannila, Jussi Rintanen, Paavo Alku, Lauri Juvela.

    Everyone should go to Topic Selection questionnaire and indicate whether you already have a project done OR in progress OR if you need a topic by 27.9.2023. 

    For those who are willing to work on one of the available topics listed, we will follow a matchmaking procedure to assign project topics. 

    MATCHMAKING PROCEDURE
    • Please go to Topic Selection questionnaire and indicate topics in your order of preference by 27.9.2023.
    • We will match projects to students, while trying to satisfy their preferences.
    • You will work on a topic alone or in a small project group of 2-3 people as specified by the supervisor.
    • There can be more than one project for one topic if so indicated by the supervisor.
    • You will be contacted ASAP by either the supervisor or Jorma.

    REPORTING

    To pass the course, the students have to:

    • optional oral presentation: give an oral presentation to the supervisor, describing the project and its research outputs and possible future plans

      • the format and the content of the oral presentation will be agreed together with the supervisor, and the presentation will be held to the supervisor.

      • presentation is not mandatory, but strongly recommended.

    • compulsory final report: write a report which would resemble a scientific article. The report should contain introduction to the problem, the proposed solution and experimental results. Supervisor should provide both guidance in writing and feedback on the report.

      • 5-10 pages in the format of a research paper

      • a typical report consists of abstract, introduction, motivation, problem statement, review of related work, proposed solution, implementation, empirical evaluation methodology, results, discussion, conclusions

      • the report can be a (draft) of a joint publication together with the supervisor or research group, in which case all author names should be visible

    • send your your project report as a readable PDF file to your supervisor and ask him/her to send to Jorma the following:

      • your project report as a readable PDF file

      • assessment of your work, consisting of the proposed grade and the number of credits


    COMPUTATIONAL RESOURCES

    • CS-IT : Paniikki and Maari workstations
      • specific software can be installed, per request 
    • Arrange with your supervisor to get an account in Triton if needed

    SCHEDULE

    The schedule for the academic year 2023-2024 is as follows:

    • 27.9.2023 @ 23.59 o'clock
    • any day

      • send your project report as a readable PDF file to your supervisor and ask him/her to forward it with its assessment to Jorma.