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Ask HN: Do you have a Master's Thesis proposal for me?
Dear HN
I'm a Computer Science student, specializing in Artifical Intelligence, who is currently nearing the end of his second last year of university. This means I'll have to do my Master's Thesis next year. However, we must already choose a topic this year.
My university offers quite a lot of topics, but none of them got me excited. None of them gave me the idea: "This seems fun, I really want to work a whole year on this", which is unfortunate. When you have to spend at least 700 estimated hours on something, it better gets you excited. It better be something you really want to work on.
There is a bright spot. We are allowed to propose a topic ourselves (which is not included in the list of topics). This may be in correspondence with a company. The idea to ask HN for a thesis proposal suddenly popped into my head, which leads to the following questions:
Do you have a thesis proposal for me? Or does your company have a thesis proposal for me?
If you can answer any of those questions with a "yes", feel free to reach out to me at hn_sebos [@] protonmail.com. Additional questions are always welcome.
- monkeybutton 4y agoWrite an AI that scans recently published papers in AI using SOTA clustering and NLP techniques. Its output is a masters level thesis proposal, and the objective function is topics you like and ones that would be accepted by the admissions committee. Go!
- sebos 4y agoAlthough I suppose it would probably be more time-efficient to just have a quick look at the conclusion of AI papers, I really like this idea. I never thought about the possibility to look at the "further proposed research/further work"-part in papers to find a thesis topic. Thank you.
- uberman 4y agoIf you can't think of a proposal on your own you probably just wasted two years of your life and should probably not have perused and advanced degree.
- sebos 4y agoI disagree. Not thinking of a thesis topic myself, does not mean I wasted two years of my life. I learned a lot during those years. I also learned that I do not know a lot. There are people who have been a long time in the field (or in other fields) who have interesting problems to work on, but lack the time or resources to work on them. Therefore it seems a reasonable question to ask.
- jstx1 4y agoFind a supervisor that you like working with - that's much more important than the specific topic you pick. And then talk to that supervisor about potential topics.
- monkeybutton 4y agoThis is the best advice and the largest mistake I made when going to grad school. I was not engaged with what my advisor was interested in and doing. They (kinda rightly) didn't give a shit about anything outside of their lab's scope of work. Find an advisor whose niche is related to what you find interesting. Otherwise don't expect much attention or feedback from them.
- saddist0 4y ago+1, seniors at your college might be another viable alternative [to select supervisor]. This post isn't the best way to select your thesis "topic". Anyone on HN knows nothing about your interest or you for that matter.
- dane-pgp 4y agoThere are two areas which I think are actively being researched but are interesting and could probably be improved by a masters level project. One is the idea of separating multiple audio tracks. For example, if you have a MIDI file of two instruments, exported to WAV, it should be possible to train an AI to produce two WAV files that sound exactly like the individual instruments being played on their own. (Last time I heard a demo of this, it seemed like the AI hadn't built a good model for what the individual instruments should sound like, even though it should be possible to infinitely generate the training data). The other is an AI for turning hand-written mathematical notation into a proper digital form (like LaTeX). Ideally you'd be able to give the AI a feed of a lecture, where notation was written on a chalkboard, and the output of the AI should be valid mathematical expressions. Bonus points if you can validate that the mathematical steps are correct (possibly by finding them in an existing corpus of mathematical steps).
- verdverm 4y agoAdd RL or graph encoders to https://github.com/verdverm/pypge https://github.com/verdverm/pypge DM (email) me if you want to learn more