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Finding a Topic

My main interest is supervising theses that are tackling a real-world question you encountered e.g. during your internship or at your workplace. These theses are typically supervised by someone from that company as the second supervisor.

Topics may be:

• accessing and improving some part of a software development or delivery process
• exploring new technology or a new combination of technology to achieve a certain goal (of interest within that company)
• working on accessability or usability issues in the context of the company and their software

Theses topics should be clearly differentiated from typical development tasks within the company. They should explore a new topic or try to answer a previously unanswered question within the context of work.

If you want to write your thesis supervised by me, please register for my office hours:

Office Hours can be found in the WIKI. Please register there for appointments.

Some Topic Ideas

These are rough ideas, which can be developed to a concrete thesis topic together.

Word Wide Web: Homepage for All

30 years after the invention of the WWW publishing own content on web has become rather difficult: expectations of a high visual standard and legal reasons mean that a lot more knowledge than a bit HTML is required to create a website. Finding a hosting solution that allows for easy content changes is also challenging, and/or costly.

On the other hand, publishing a web site for free can be easy and fast (e.g. with github pages, Hugo and a free hosting service), but solutions like this are not accessible without some computer science / coding background.

Content Management Systems like Wordpress are often the go-to solution, but are overly complex for most use cases. Commercial solutions exists, but will often lock in your content into a proprietary system or vendor.

How can this gap be closed? How can web publishing be made accessible again?

Providing a Front-End for the static web site generator Hugo may be a solution, similar solutions are out there, like HokusCMS but without local installation. (Here’s a list of Hugo frontends)

The goal of this thesis would be to access this topic further, and develop a possible solution, and implement and test a proof of concept.

Sustainable Web Usage: Portable Bookmarks

How do you find a website again you remember having seen a while ago, or access web sites that you regularly visit? In many cases - even for url autocompletion - web searches are part of this process, as it is usually easier to “google” something again compared to remembering or even finding the url again. But: web searches consume way more energy compared to directly accessing a web site.

All browsers allow the creating of a bookmark list. Who uses them for what? Are they usable - and portable - enough to be a replacement for just googling again? How can they be made more usable, portable and maybe even better than just searching and finding everything again?

There is a range of possible theses topics in these questions, which we can find and define together based on your interests.