The Thesis

All Honours students must complete a 4 subject equivalent thesis by enrolling in INFT41-440.
Each student will be associated with a supervisor (sometimes two) who will advise on the student's thesis and relate subjects throughout the course. In contrast to most third-year projects a thesis is almost always closely related to the supervisor's technical interests, and is more research-oriented. At the beginning of the course (see Appendix A) a list of supervisors and brief descriptions of their proposed projects will be available. During the following week, students should discuss further with the supervisor(s) any topics that they found interesting.

The student-supervisor collaboration on a research project is a close one, because, in most circumstances, the initial idea comes from the supervisor. It is natural for your supervisor to have input into your thesis along the way. However, you should not expect your supervisor to do the work for you, nor to provide unreasonable, last-minute assistance. You are expected to demonstrate a degree of initiative and independence, as well as critical thinking ability. You are required to maintain regular contact with your supervisor. If possible, meetings should be scheduled each week, but under no circumstances should they occur less frequently than once a fortnight. These meetings allow you to obtain advice on work being performed and permit your supervisor to keep track of your progress. Regular meetings allow problems to be discovered before they drag on too long and create more serious problems. Both students and staff are advised to maintain a brief record of each meeting. Ordinarily, a supervisor is expected to be available throughout the academic year. In the event that your supervisor is going to be absent for an extended period, suitable arrangements should be made so that your work can continue during the period of absence. If you feel that your work is being hampered by an absence or lack of cooperation on the part of your supervisor, you should consult with the Course Coordinator as soon as possible.

Requirements and advice concerning specific aspects of the thesis are given in Section 5. The assessment weighting of the various thesis components are given in Section 6.

You are expected to familiarise yourself with the literature, techniques, and general principles associated with the thesis, and will be required to present a written thesis for examination. The thesis is the final product. Students who do not submit a thesis will fail. The final version of each thesis will be bound once all assessment is complete. By the date given in Appendix A, you must provide a final laser-printed copy of your thesis to the Course Coordinator. The School will pay for bound copies for you, your supervisor(s), and the School library. Extra student copies can be obtained at cost. In addition to the bound copies, the School keeps an electronic version of each thesis. By the date for bound copies you must also submit to the Course Coordinator a full online copy of your thesis.

You may also be required to make available a complete version of any code or data that is related to your thesis. This is necessary so that your supervisor or other interested parties can refer to or build on your work in the future.
 

Detailed Thesis Requirements

The following describes what you are supposed to do at each stage of the schedule. See Appendix A for a summary of the deadlines for each component, including the due dates for each document and dates for seminars will be distributed by the Course Coordinator. All written documents, except program code and other exceptions, should be prepared using a word processing system that produces PDFt output. One option is to use LaTeX on the Unix system shell.
When you submit a document it will be marked by your supervisor(s) and another staff member (called your examiner). This results in two marks that are then averaged to determine your final mark for the document. In cases where there is a substantial difference between the supervisor and reader marks, another examiner may be asked to read the document and assess it to resolve the difference.

Written Research Proposal

Once the project has been selected, the first thing you are required to do is submit a written research proposal to formally outline the project (normally no more than 10 pages in length).

At least the following items need to be covered:

Name of Student
Supervisor(s)
Title of the Thesis Project Introduction. This briefly sets the proposed topic in the context of existing work and describes the fundamental problem to be investigated. Aims, Relevance and Significance of the thesis topic
Preliminary Research Plan and Methods Expected Outcomes.
This section can include any preliminary results which you (and sometimes, your supervisor) have already obtained. Timetable of Activities Facilities Required.

Bibliography

This proposal is the first research assignment. Although it will not be formally assessed, unsatisfactory submissions may be returned for rewriting. Submit a draft of the proposal to your supervisor in advance of the deadline for review. The proposal gives your supervisor an early opportunity to comment on your writing style before you begin to assemble more crucial documents.

Literature Review

A literature review placing your thesis project in the context of other work is normally a significant part of a thesis. To prepare for this, early in the year you are required to submit a critical literature review related to your proposed project. The early deadline is aimed to ensure that you have adequately surveyed the literature of your chosen field and that you have a good understanding of the current concepts, controversies, etc., before you get too far into your project. The review also serves as further training in the expository style of scientific writing, which emphasises the quality of accuracy, clarity and conciseness. Weakness in writing style, choice of terms, spelling, punctuation and citation techniques can be identified and corrected at this stage, well before preparation of the final thesis.

If there is not much literature directly related to your chosen project, you and your supervisor should decide on a related topic for the purposes of the literature review so that a significant literature review is still carried out.

The literature review should be prepared in standard scientific format, including an abstract of 100-200 words length, sectioned text, and a list of references/bibliography. The document should ordinarily be 10-20 pages in length (excluding bibliography).

Your supervisor's guidance must be sought from the outset when planning and preparing the review. Each paper that you find relevant to your chosen topic will contain a set of references, some of which will also be relevant. These will lead to other papers and so on. The result is that your advance into the literature may be by a geometric progression of papers, and obviously you then have to make decisions as to which papers/books are most important to your review. The suggested page limit is a guide to the extent of literature research expected for the review. However, the review must be more than an assembling of references under appropriate headings. When you have gathered and assimilated most of your literature, think about what arguments you would like to develop, the weakness that you see in the research to date, the confusions, etc., and then write your review of the topic citing the appropriate references. Read some survey papers in some academic journals (e.g., the ACM Computing Surveys) in the library. Your supervisor may be able to suggest useful survey articles. With regard to reference citations in the text and bibliography, the conventions followed by an IEEE or ACM journal should be adopted, selected in consultation with your supervisor.

The literature review is submitted to your supervisor. Following assessment, the comments on the manuscript should be taken up, with your supervisor. Relevant portions of the review may be incorporated into the final thesis.