Prof. Dr. Volker M. Koch, Switzerland

Homepage Search Contact

Student Projects

 

Semester Projects

  • 10 weeks part-time (4 ECTS; about 12 hours/week)
  • Use a laboratory book. Use it as a journal and write down:
    • Experiment descriptions
    • Results
    • Ideas for future projects
  • If you are interested, participate in our Weekly BME Seminar.
  • Write a report (see below). The report has to be given to the professor by the deadline (printed with spiral binding or similar, and in electronic form). Binding material can be bought from Christoph Meier.
  • Together with the report, please hand in a CD or DVD with the following content:
    • Report in PDF and source format
    • Final presentation in PDF and source format
    • Program source code
    • Circuit diagrams in editable source format
    • Circuit board layouts in editable source format
    • CAD model data
    • Any other important source files that you have produced
    • Downloaded literature that you refer to in your report
    • Data files (e.g., signals) and other files that are necessary to evaluate the programs
  • Prepare and hold an informal talk. Your talk should last 20 minutes (+/- 2 minutes).

 

Bachelor Projects

  • 8 weeks full-time (12 ECTS; about 45 hours/week)
  • Use a laboratory book. Use it as a journal and write down:
    • Experiment descriptions
    • Results
    • Ideas for future projects
  • If you are interested, participate in our Weekly BME Seminar.
  • Write an abstract for the BOOK.
  • Write a report (see below). The report has to be given to the professor by the deadline (printed with spiral binding or similar, and in electronic form). Binding material can be bought from Christoph Meier.
  • Together with the report, please hand in a CD or DVD with the following content:
    • Report in PDF and source format
    • Final presentation in PDF and source format
    • Program source code
    • Circuit diagrams in editable source format
    • Circuit board layouts in editable source format
    • CAD model data
    • Any other important source files that you have produced
    • Downloaded literature that you refer to in your report
    • Data files (e.g., signals) and other files that are necessary to evaluate the programs
  • Prepare a poster. The poster has to be handed in on the day of your defense.
  • A defense (talk, discussion) is required. Your talk should last 20 minutes (+/- 2 minutes).

 

Master Projects

  • 6 months full-time
  • Use a laboratory book. Use it as a journal and write down:
    • Experiment descriptions
    • Results
    • Ideas for future projects
  • If you are interested, participate in our Weekly BME Seminar.
  • Write a report (see below). The report has to be given to the professor by the deadline (printed with spiral binding or similar, and in electronic form). Binding material can be bought from Christoph Meier.
  • Together with the report, please hand in a CD or DVD with the following content:
    • Report in PDF and source format
    • Final presentation in PDF and source format
    • Program source code
    • Circuit diagrams in editable source format
    • Circuit board layouts in editable source format
    • CAD model data
    • Any other important source files that you have produced
    • Downloaded literature that you refer to in your report
    • Data files (e.g., signals) and other files that are necessary to evaluate the programs
  • A midterm presentation is desired.
  • A defense (talk, discussion) is required. Your talk should last 20 minutes (+/- 2 minutes).
  • A conference and/or journal paper is desired.

 

Ph.D. Projects

  • Please contact me if you are interesting in pursuing a Ph.D. project with me.

 

General Advice

I have supervised more than 20 student projects and I saw many times that although certain basic rules seem trivial, students (and basically everyone else including myself) forget them sometimes and don't follow them all the time. So I present the most important advice here as a reminder.

  • Make a time plan and a plan of your overall goals and write them down. You don't have to follow your plans all the time and you can revise them as often as you wish but it's very important to have them (in written form). 
  • Prioritize by preparing a sorted list (a ranking) of tasks that are important to accomplish.
  • If you want to improve something, measure it first. For example, measure the time you spend on your project. If you don't cheat (subtract all breaks!), this will give you an important feedback. Another example is to make a (prioritized) list of things that you want to do during a day, a week, or any other period of time. Tick each item on your list that is done. This approach is psychologically very helpful.
  • Have a neat folder where you sort your thoughts, your math, your derivations, etc. 
  • Backup your data regularly on some external storage device. It is your responsibility that your files are safe, even after a major hard disk crash.
  • After a short reading stage, if you still don't know where to start, start somewhere, but start.
  • Use the help of assistants and other experts, e.g., other professors at BFH-TI.

 

Writing Reports

  • I would start writing the final document as soon as possible. Make a table of contents and then update it as you move forward with your research. In this way you can avoid doing a lot of extra work that will not end up in your thesis. Starting to write your final document early keeps you focused.
  • Reserve enough time to finalize your report. One week is probably not enough if you start from scratch!
  • Have a chapter called "Conclusions" or similar. The content of this chapter should be: "Summary", "Discussion", "Conclusions", and "Ideas and Future Work".
  • Do not forget to describe the state of the art. Often, an initial hypothesis should be stated and evaluated later.
  • Compare your system with other systems and describe differences, advantages, and disadvantages of your system.
  • People should be able to read your bachelor thesis report independently of other reports. They should also not have to refer to the appendix to often.
  • For great advice on writing reports go to Paul Fieguth's teaching page.
  • My tips on how to create EPS and PDF files from Matlab figures for LaTeX
  • In general, the text in your report should be written by yourself. If you copy text, you need to mark the text. Do not forget the reference.
  • Source information has to be given, e.g., when facts are quoted or figures are used that are not yours.
  • Include a complete and correct bibliography. Here are some examples (IEEE style):
    • Book: C. Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach. Roberts & Company Publishers, 2004.
    • Journal paper: R. F. Dougherty, V. M. Koch, A. A. Brewer, B. Fischer, J. Modersitzki, and B. A. Wandell, “Visual field representations and locations of visual areas V1/2/3 in human visual cortex,” Journal of Vision, vol. 3, no. 10, article 1, pp. 586–598, October 2003. [Online]. Available: http://journalofvision.org/3/10/1/
    • Conference paper: V. M. Koch and H.-A. Loeliger, “EMG signal decomposition by loopy belief propagation,” in 30th IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (IEEE ICASSP 2005), Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A., March 18-23 2005, pp. 397–400.
    • Report: V. M. Koch, “Novel methods for the visualization and analysis of functional maps in cortex,” Diploma (Master’s) thesis, Universität Karlsruhe and Stanford University, Zurich, Switzerland, July 2001.
    • Web page: “muscle,” Encyclopædia Britannica, July 2006. [Online]. Available: http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9110701
  • Rather write a shorter report with high quality than a long report with poor quality.
  • Make sure that your report is correct. Avoid mistakes by double-checking the facts. The report should be consistent.
  • You can buy nice book covers from Christoph Meier (optics lab). A binding machine is available in the biomedical engineering lab. Avoid using spiral binding because book covers look better.
  • Here is a not so serious guide...

 

Giving Talks

 

Publications

To access the content of some of the following sites, a VPN connection to BFH-TI is required.

 

Programming

  • Think before you start with programming. Revising/debugging the code costs a lot of time.
  • Test every module (e.g., every node function) individually! After you have put everything together it is much harder to find mistakes. For example, place a main() function in every Java class to test this class.
  • Make the code work first (in a clean way) before optimizing for speed or computational efficiency. Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer at Microsoft, wrote nicely: "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
  • Keeping the code neat requires some time and effort. But it's worth it. IDEs like Eclipse provide great tools that help you with refactoring your source code. Sometimes it's worth it to start from scratch.
  • Read my Java tips and my MATLAB tips.

 

04/2010