| Semester Projects
- 10 weeks part-time (4 ECTS; about 12 hours/week)
- Start semester project: Thursday, February 19, 2009
- End of semester project: Friday, May 1, 2009, 17:00
- Use a laboratory book. Use it as a journal and write down:
- Experiment descriptions
- Results
- Ideas for future projects
- 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) other files that are necessary to
evaluate the programs
Bachelor Projects
- 8 weeks full-time (12 ECTS; about 45 hours/week)
- Start of bachelor project: Monday, May 4, 2009; end of bachelor
project: June 26, 2009, 17:00
- Alternatively:
Start of bachelor project: Monday, May 11, 2009; end of bachelor
project: July 3, 2009, 17:00
- Use a laboratory book. Use it as a journal and write down:
- Experiment descriptions
- Results
- Ideas for future projects
- 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) other files that are necessary to
evaluate the programs
- Prepare a poster.
- A defense (talk, discussion) is required.
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
- 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) other files that are necessary to
evaluate the programs
- A midterm presentation is desired.
- A defense (talk, discussion) is required.
- 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!
-
Always include a chapter "Ideas" or "Future Work" in your report.
List your ideas that you could not work out in your project.
-
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 system and describe differences,
advantages, and disadvantages of your system.
-
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
-
Buy hard covers from Christoph Meier.
-
Use a serif font for your text.
-
Include a correct bibliography (document by Jörn Justiz)
-
Source information has to be given, e.g., when facts are quoted or
figures are used that are not yours.
-
Maximum number of pages: semester projects (40), bachelor projects
(60)
-
Rather write a shorter report with high quality than a long report
with poor quality.
-
Do not forget to include references (also in figure captions).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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