Here are a very short, concise beginner guide for AIT Master students (applicable to Ph.D. students too).

0. Graduation criteria

To graduate from AIT Brain lab, Master students should either (1) develop a workable, deployed product (justification of 1-year effort) with formal user evaluation, or (2) publish in top-tier journals / conferences.    Ph.D. students should publish 3 top-tier journals / conferences.

1. Timeline

Here is a simple figure explaining your one-year thesis journey.  You have one year to complete your thesis;  most students extend to one or two more semesters:

timeline

2. Selecting topics

First step to choose topics is to visit http://www.chaklam.com/projects.   I TRY NOT to work on any other topics outside of this list.

Once you select the topic, a good exercise to do is to fill in the blanks of these questions, which will form the five paragraphs of your Introduction:

  • BACKGROUND:   The ability to differentiate person in dialogue summarization is important.  Past work mostly focuses on ________ (talk about what people mostly do…)
     
  • PROBLEM:  However, the key limitation is ___________________________(major gap in past work)
     
  • SOLUTION:   This paper proposes _____________________ (solution that directly fix the gap)
     
  • RESULTS:  We found that ___________________ (results that confirm we fix the gap…)
     
  • CONTRIBUTION:   The results implied that _________________ (generalizability of your work…)

3. Do your research!

Doing your research is a daunting task.  I have provided a very short snippets of success you may want to try.  For students working on products instead, you probably won’t read as many papers but probably read when you meet some technical challenge.

how to do research

4. Deliverables

Your main deliverables for your thesis are

  1. the public GitHub link of your code,
  2. deployed demo website link,
  3. final thesis report
  4. final publication (research route)