Teaching – DFKI – Interactive Machine Learning Lab

Finding a Thesis Topic

Students who are interested in writing a bachelor’s or master’s thesis should begin thinking about possible topics (cf. hot topics for thesis projects on this page) or propose their own. Good research questions often have their origins in scientific papers around the research topics of the IML lab. Be on the look out for new data sources that might help provide new insights into a special IML research topic.

Your Advisor and Your Committee

In order to write a bachelor’s or master’s thesis you must find a member of the IML lab who is willing to be your thesis advisor. You propose your thesis topic together with your advisor to Prof. Sonntag as the first reviewer in your committee.

How Long Should it Be? How Long Does it Take?

A bachelor’s thesis is generally 30-60 pages, not including the bibliography. A master’s thesis is generally 60-80 pages, not including the bibliography. However, the length will vary according to the topic and the method of analysis, so the appropriate length will be determined by you, your advisor, and your committee. Students who write a master’s thesis generally do so over two semesters, bachelor’s one semester.

Some other Formal Requirements

Oldenburg University: Follow the instructions in the Bachelor/Master Oberseminar.
Saarland University: Follow the instructions in the Bachelor/Master Seminar.

These rules apply for all theses assessed by Prof. Sonntag as the first reviewer. Be sure to check the schedule for graduation so that you hold (1) your oral related work talk and (2) your oral defense talk in time to complete and submit your finished thesis.

Follow the formatting requirements for Theses and Dissertations listed on our web site. A template for Oldenburg University can be found here. A template for Saarland University can be found here. Thesis examples can be found here.

You must maintain continuous enrollment Oldenburg University or at Saarland University while working on the bachelor’s or master’s thesis. If you are planning to conduct interviews, surveys or do other research involving human subjects, you must obtain prior approval from DFKI.

Hot Topics for Thesis Projects

Game with a Purpose: Create a Game for Collecting and Annotating Digital Ink Data

In this work, your task is to implement a game with a purpose that helps in collecting hand-drawn sketches with annotations for machine learning. Your task will be to design and implement a suitable game, and to evaluate it in a user study. This game should integrate game mechanics that fit the purpose of generating/annotating sketches via touch input, stylus, or digital pens. The focus shall be on integrating interactive machine learning techniques via game mechanics that, e.g., enable the user to interactively train a machine learning model which is used during the game and has an effect on the game (i.e., the better the model, the better it supports the user in accomplishing the objective of the game).

Your profile

You should have solid programming skills. A plus is experience with Unity 3D or another game development engine of choice.

Contact: Michael Barz

Interactive and Explainable Feature-Based Sketch Recognition

Sketches can be recorded using a digital pen on paper or styluses on tablets and smartphones. Digital pen features describe various geometrical, spacial, temporal and other properties of pen input. The goal of this thesis topic is to create an interactive pen-based user interface using the digital pen features for explainable ML-based sketch recognition. An example video of such a system is found at https://vimeo.com/76839534

Contact: Alexander Prange

Interactive Handwriting Spellchecking and Correction

In this thesis state of the art handwriting recognition in combination with machine learning approaches will be used for automated spell checking, where users can interactively train both the gesture recognition and the spell checking models. The spell checking aspect can be combined with handwriting generation through deep learning networks to provide a fully interactive correction platform. See also https://iml.dfki.de/handwriting-spellchecker/ and https://github.com/Grzego/handwriting-generation.

Contact: Alexander Prange

Relevance-based Adaptation of Documents based on Eye Tracking

In this thesis, you will implement a system that adapts the visualization of a document based on real-time relevance feedback. You will use/implement a machine learning model that predicts text relevance based on the users eye movements to, e.g., highlight relevant or hide irrelevant information from the user.

Anna Maria Feit, Lukas Vordemann, Seonwook Park, Caterina Berube, and Otmar Hilliges. 2020. Detecting relevance during decision-making from eye movements for UI adaptation. In Eye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (ETRA), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379155.3391321

Nilavra Bhattacharya, Somnath Rakshit, and Jacek Gwizdka. 2020. Towards Real-time Webpage Relevance Prediction Using Convex Hull Based Eye-tracking Features. In ACM Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications, 10. https://doi.org/10.1145/3379157.3391302

Contact: Michael Barz

Explainable Medical Decision

You will implement novel modern approaches in computer vision such as Transfer Learning, Graph Neural Network, or Semi-Supervised Learning to solve important medical decision problems like Breast cancer detection, Chest-(X-Ray/CT) abnormalities diagnosis, or related medical domains. The target is to achieve state-of-the-art performance and the proposed method could be explainable to end users to improve the system’s reliability.

Nguyen, Duy MH, et al. “An Attention Mechanism using Multiple Knowledge Sources for COVID-19 Detection from CT Images.”, AAAI 2021, Workshop: Trustworthy AI for Healthcare.

Soberanis-Mukul, Roger D., Nassir Navab, and Shadi Albarqouni. “An Uncertainty-Driven GCN Refinement Strategy for Organ Segmentation.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2012.03352 (2020).

Contact: Duy Nguyen

Theoretical Machine Learning for Medical Applications

In this topic, we will investigate important theoretical machine learning problems that have high impacts on several medical applications. It includes but is not limited to optimization formulation to incorporate efficient user’s feedback to boost the performance of trained models besides available training data (active learning), investigate benefits of transfer learning strategies when dealing with scarce data issues in medical problems, or training algorithms to adapt with highly imbalanced data distribution.

Wilder, Bryan, Eric Horvitz, and Ece Kamar. “Learning to complement humans.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.00582 (2020).

De, Abir, et al. “Classification Under Human Assistance.” AAAI (2021).

Yao, Huaxiu, et al. “Hierarchically structured meta-learning.” International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 2019.

Contact: Duy Nguyen

Real-time fixation detection for head-mounted eye tracking

Robust fixation detection is essential for analysis of mobile eye tracking data in research and for gaze-based interaction. However, most fixation detection algorithms are optimized for remote eye tracking which makes them less robust in mobile settings with users moving around. A recent approach for mobile settings addresses this issue by incorporating visual similarity of gaze targets to identify fixation events more robustly [1]. But, it was not evaluated in real-time interactive settings. Your task in this thesis will be to implement the proposed algorithm (and optionally an improved version) and to systematically evaluate it in mobile and natural interaction settings.

[1] Julian Steil, Michael Xuelin Huang, and Andreas Bulling. 2018. Fixation detection for head-mounted eye tracking based on visual similarity of gaze targets. In Eye Tracking Research and Applications Symposium (ETRA), 1–9. https://doi.org/10.1145/3204493.3204538

Contact: Michael Barz

Image Caption Generation Under Low Resource Setting

Inside this topic, we would investigate the image caption generation problem under the low resource setting, i.e., unavailability of large amount of paired data for training the model. For solving this challenge, we will explore and study the impact of different techniques from the areas of transfer learning, active learning. The goal of the thesis would be to develop an image caption system that achieves state-of-the-art performance under this low resource constraint.

Contact: Rajarshi Biswas

Interactive Joint Clustering of Unpaired Images and Text

Under this topic, we would investigate interactive machine learning techniques for jointly clustering unpaired images and text. The goal would be to develop a deep learning algorithm that incorporates human-in-the-loop interaction to guide the joint learning of concepts from images and text for achieving clusters/groups having common concepts.

Contact: Rajarshi Biswas