uzh master thesis template

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Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics

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Part of a Bachelor's or Master's program involves writing a thesis that treats a subject in the student's degree program in a scholarly manner.

Table of contents

Completion time and scope, general procedure, selection of topic and supervisor – business and economics, selection of topic and supervisor – quantitative finance, selection of topic and supervisor – informatics, olat process: registration, collection of project definition, and submission of thesis, alternative process: registration, collection of project definition and submission of thesis.

Registration for graduation

Note on publication

The information below applies to all theses.

*Plan the completion of your degree in advance, taking into consideration the published deadlines.

Registration deadlines

There are different procedures for the thesis process, from the issuance of the binding project definition to the timely and formally correct submission. The exact procedure is determined by the supervisor. 

For students of Informatics , the information and documents can be found on the website of the Department of Informatics.

Fact sheet for Bachelor's theses in Informatics   Fact sheet for Master's theses in Informatics

For students of Business and Economics as well as of the Joint Degree Master Program in Quantitative Finance of UZH and ETH, the two possible procedures for the process from registration to submission are presented below.

Business and Economics students may write their thesis with a professor of their choice from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics at UZH. The individual departments can provide additional assistance when it comes to selecting a topic.

Information from the Department of Finance   Topics suggested by the Departments of Economics and Business Administration (German only (PDF, 273 KB)

Students of the joint degree Master's program in Quantitative Finance at UZH and ETH may write their thesis with a professor of their choice from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics at UZH or the Department of Mathematics at ETH.

Information on the Quantitative Finance program

Informatics students must write their thesis with a professor from their program of study.

List and information for Bachelor's theses in Informatics   List and information for Master's theses in Informatics

After you have found a supervisor the further steps will be done via OLAT. You will receive an e-mail from your supervisor stating that you have been accepted into an OLAT course and that you can start with your thesis. As soon as you have selected the link in the e-mail and have thus joined the course, you will have one day (24 hours) to select your thesis topic.

With your selection, your personal workflow in OLAT will start in which the binding deadline will be recorded and which will always be visible for you. You will also receive an e-mail with the binding deadline. Please note that the deadline has to be met.

The following instructions describe the process and the further steps you have to take now.

Instructions OLAT (PDF, 960 KB)

You must submit your final thesis digitally in OLAT no later than the binding deadline (accessible in your personal workflow in OLAT or in the assignment email at the beginning of the workflow). Theses submitted late are considered to have been failed. Please be aware that the deadline is defined to the minute precisely and this has to be adhered to

Business and Economics or Quantitative Finance students can request their project definition by e-mail to [email protected] . They will also receive their topic and the exact deadline by e-mail. The submission will also be done by e-mail.

Fact sheet for theses using analogue procedure in Business and Economics and in Quantitative Finance (PDF, 126 KB)

The following documents must be attached to the e-mail:

• Proof of matriculation (e.g., student ID card)
• Students in a Bachelor's program: Proof that the assessment level has been passed (transcript of records, module booking printout or online summary of credits on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop)
• Students in a Master's program: Proof of admission to the Master's program for students who have not obtained a Bachelor's degree from the Faculty of Business, Economics and Informatics at the University of Zurich (letter of admission incl. any appendix to the letter of admission).
• The completed registration form.

Form for Business and Economics (PDF, 545 KB) Form for Quantitative Finance (PDF, 756 KB)

The thesis must be submitted by e-mail  no later than the agreed submission deadline (until 23:59) to [email protected]

The thesis may not be placed in the Dean's Office mailbox.

Theses submitted late are considered to have been failed.

In order to register for graduation certain deadlines apply. Please consider the information on the degree conferral dates:

Degree conferral dates

The actual registration for graduation takes place in the app "Study progress & graduation". Please not the procedure on the following website:

Publication by UZH As a researcher at the University of Zurich, you are required by the UZH Open Science Policy to publish a complete version of your current publications on the ZORA repository, if the legal situation allows it. Further information on publishing on the UZH ZORA repository can be found here .

Publication by external parties After completing their final theses, students repeatedly receive requests from (mainly) German publishers for a publication. Such requests should be treated with caution. Clarify any publication with your supervisor in advance. The supervisor can impose conditions for a publication. Ultimately, however, it is your decision whether you want to publish with a publisher. You should be aware that this is not to be equated with a publication in a scientific journal. Further information on the various publication channels can be found here .

Weiterführende Informationen

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Department of Informatics Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Group

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This page lists several ideas for Bachelor's and Master's theses. Most of the thesis proposals are based on recent research, exploring branches that most researchers overlook. Some Bachelor's theses proposals can be extended to Master's theses. While each page lists requirements, these are not strict requirements at the beginning of the thesis, but rather skills to acquire during the thesis. For more details, send me an email.  Prof. Dr. Manuel Günther

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• Open Theses
• Active Theses
• Past Theses

Topics for new Theses

Students are most welcome to develop their own topics, and we are happy to supervise them as long as the topic is anywhere close to our fields of expertise -- otherwise we are not able to provide fruitful input. General topics of interest to the AIML group include (but are not limited to):

• Face Recognition: the identification of a person based on an image or a video of their face
• Facial Attribut Classification: the classification of attributes (gender, hair color, face shape, ...) from facial images
• Open-Set Classification: teaching classifiers to discern objects of classes of no interest
• Adversarial Samples: generating small modifications of correctly classified samples that change the output of classifiers, or preventing these kinds of attacks
• Explainable AI: which parts of the inputs are of great importance to the decision of deep learning systems
• Traditional Features: How to make use of Gabor wavelets or other traditional image processing techniques in deep networks
• Medical Image Processing: Applying of the above methods to medical images; I only host topics provided by other insitutitions (ETH, USZ, Balgrist, Idiap, ...)

Topics that we generally do not supervise are in the area of Natural Language Processing, Social Media, Robotics or Reinforcement Learning since we have other experts on these topics ( Prof. Dr. Martin Volk , Prof. Dr. Anikó Hannák , Prof. Dr. Davide Scaramuzza , Prof. Dr. Giorgia Ramponi ) in our department . If you have a topic in mind and believe that we would be a good supervisor for, please send me an email.  Prof. Dr. Manuel Günther

Requirements and Submissions

It is a requirement to use LaTeX for writing the final thesis document. Students should use the AIML Thesis Template (ZIP, 314 KB) .

Generally, all theses need to be defended, including Master theses (mandatory by the Department rules ) and Bachelor theses. Usually, the defense will be scheduled about 3-5 weeks after the submission of the thesis. Deviating from the recommendations, the time for a Master thesis' defense presentation is 30 minutes followed by 15 minutes of questions, while a Bachelor thesis' defense should take 20-30 minutes of presentation and 10-15 minutes of questions.

Additionally, the source code for the thesis needs to be submitted, approximately at the time of the defense. The source code is typically written in Python and use the PyTorch library. It should be self-contained and make use only of public libraries and data (if possible). Source code needs to be documented. This allows fellow students to make use of previously implemented code.

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Department of Finance

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The preparation for the application as well as the writing of the Bachelor or Master's thesis at the Department of Finance entails different steps, whereby the application process is described in detail here.

• You find your own topic, write a Research Proposal and submit it via DF Thesis Market.
• Choose one of the provided Topic Proposals and apply for the corresponding topic on the DF Thesis Market including a letter of motivation.
• Supervisor: If your Research Proposal has been accepted or your application for an existing topic has been successful, you will be contacted by the person who will supervise you in your thesis. Based on your Research Proposal inputs, your supervisor will formulate the thesis assignment.
• Thesis assignment on OLAT: The task assignment includes your official thesis assignment for the written thesis. It can be collected on OLAT from the moment you have been informed by your supervisor. Once you collect the thesis assignment on OLAT, the time limit of six months starts.
• Time limit: Start working on your thesis early and discuss problems with your supervisor. Nevertheless, remember that a Bachelor or Master’s thesis is to be written independently.
• Submission: You must submit your thesis via OLAT i.e. you upload your thesis and any additional documents/attachments as a ZIP-file to OLAT.
• Grading of task: You receive your grade within a month after submission.

The following Video in German shows the recording of a presentation (PDF, 276 KB) in which the students were informed. It goes more into detail about the individual steps.

The prerequisite for writing a Bachelor and Master's thesis at the Department of Finance is relevant prior knowledge in the corresponding subject area. In particular, the relevant lectures must have been attended and passed. Provided Topic Proposals may contain further requirements, which you will find in the respective proposal.

It is also important that the rules and instructions of the Dean's Office ( study and graduation ) are generally to be noted. The responsibility regarding compliance with these regulations lies with you.

Application

In order to write a thesis at the Department of Finance, a digital application via the DF Thesis Market is required. You will need the following documents for the application:

• Curriculum Vitae (as PDF)
• Transcript of records (as PDF, current export from the Module Booking)
• Research Proposal (if you propose a topic of your own)

For the application via the Department of Finance Thesis Market, you also need your UZH login credentials (shortname and password).

There are two ways to apply for a thesis at the Department of Finance:

Option A: Own topic

Elaborate your own suggested topic and write a Research Proposal. On two to three pages, the Research Proposal summarises your motivation, the objectives, the planned procedure and the expected results. The following documents serve as a guide:

• Instructions for writing a Research Proposal (PDF, 69 KB)
• Example of a Research Proposal (PDF, 205 KB)

If you would like to write an empirical paper, check before submitting your application whether the data you need can be found in the available databases . It is advisable to check with a concrete example whether the data quality is sufficient (e.g., availability of time series).

It is important that you assign your Research Proposal to the correct research area so that it can be made available to appropriate supervisors. The research areas and fields of interest listed in the table below can serve as a decision-making aid. The links of the Professors lead to the Bachelor and Master's theses that they supervised so far. They can give an intuition on typical topics for writing a thesis.

Based on your Research Proposal, the final thesis assignment will be issued. However, the Department of Finance reserves the right to ask for improvements to the proposal, to make changes, to provide a different topic or to reject the application.

Option B: Provided topic

Apply for a topic provided by a supervisor via DF Thesis Market . Look at the topics on the marketplace, choose one and apply. Note that in addition to a CV and transcript of records, a short letter of motivation is also required for the application. Describe how the provided topic matches your skills and interests, and how the topic fits into your course of study.

Useful documents

As guidance to help you estimate the length of a thesis, we provide you with two sample theses:

• Bachelor’s thesis: The different theories of the 2010 Flash Crash with main focus on high-frequency trading (PDF, 1 MB)
• Master’s thesis: Strategic Allocation to Return Factors (PDF, 1 MB)

Additionally you can find a template for LaTeX (ZIP, 414 KB) .

Further notes

The Department of Finance strongly recommends that you start finding a topic for your Bachelor or Master's thesis at an early stage. The application must be submitted at least one month before the desired starting month. For example if you want to start writing your thesis at the beginning of May, you must apply by the end of March. 

The matching process usually takes about a month, sometimes longer (especially for your own proposals), since all supervisors supervise several theses, and your own proposal must match the interests of your supervisor in terms of content. We will inform you as soon as the matching process is completed, or if we need further information or adjustments from you. If you want/need to start as soon as possible, you also have the option to apply to one of the posted proposals.

The DF endeavours to offer all applicants the opportunity to write a thesis at the Department of Finance, but we cannot guarantee a specific topic or a specific supervisor. Temporary bottlenecks may occur in the supervision. If you have any questions or problems in connection with your application, please contact the study coordinator and Managing Director of the DF, Dr. Benjamin Wilding, at [email protected] .

Research interest

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