Overview

This page has information for students wishing to do their Master’s Thesis under my supervision. Other faculty members will have different requirements. Our department does not yet offer the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence, although many of our graduates have gone on to that degree at other institutions.

While primarily a degree that is supposed to be an affidavit of mastery of a wide breadth of computer science, the M.S. degree also requires a thesis in which some new ground is broken in some chosen subject area. The thesis is required to be of publishable quality, and must demonstrate the student’s ability to perform and adequately disseminate research.

Students should not undertake a thesis project in an unfamiliar subject area. If necessary, students are welcome, and encouraged, to take a one semester independent studies course in such an area before undertaking the thesis.

Requirements

Before you begin, generate a proposal. It must contain:

• A proposed title
• The subject area you are working in
• Why it is interesting
• Goals and objectives
• Any hypotheses you might have now
• What you think you can come up with that we don’t know now
• Tools you will use, if any in your research

Discuss the proposal, and your background and qualifications, with me before you begin your research.

Initially, generate:

• A reading list, in bibliography format, of 40 or so sources that are important in your area. You do not have to read all of them, but you do have to put together a useful list. I assume you will acquaint yourself with at least some of them. (Don’t stuff this list exclusively with blog posts. Ensure most are peer-reviewed papers, books, vendor publications, or other expert-validated sources.)

During the preparation:

• Each week, end me a very short email with a bullet-point summary of what you did all week (a progress report of sorts). If you prefer, you may keep a blog instead, as long as it is updated frequently.
• Meet with me every two weeks to discuss your progress.

The paper should be organized, roughly, as follows:

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Abstract
• Section 1: Introduction, whose last paragraph says something like “The rest of this thesis is organized as follows....”
• Section 2: Background, covering previous work
• Section 3: Theory behind the work you are doing
• Section 4: Implementation, technical details, measurements, results. etc.
• Section 5: Conclusions and Future Research
• Appendices, which might contain additional detailed tables, charts, longer source code snippets, full language grammars, and similar artifacts.
• Annotated Bibliography

Number the sections 1, 1.1, 1.1.1, etc., and number the appendices A, A.1, B, etc. Do not number the abstract or bibliography.

Official Requirements

The above guidelines are simply informative.The official structure and formatting guidelines, together with a LaTeX template that you must use, are found in this private GitHub Repository.

Please ask for membership in the organization owning the repository to access the guidelines and the template.

Some Past Theses Supervised

This list is not complete. If I missed any one’s work, I’m so sorry. If you know of any I missed, let me know. Thanks!

Spring, 2026

Gray von Goetz und Schwanenfliess, A Formal Ontology of Combat Feel

CJ Phillips, Comparing Goal-Oriented Action Planning and Flocking Behavior for Multi-Agent Combat AI

Matthew Lee, Hybrid Rendering: Combining Ray-Tracing with Static Techniques as Applied to Rendering Stained Glass

Spring, 2025

Natalie Lau, An Argument against Gradual Type Systems in Programming Language Semantics

Spring, 2024

Julian Gonzalez, Investigating the Efficacy of Persistent Data Structures on Asymmetric Scheduling Algorithms for Heterogeneous CPU Architectures

Spring, 2022

Marco Berardini, On the Pragmatics of Web Application Frameworks

Louis Kane, Towards Quantum Machine Learning with Sequence-to-Image Data

Fall, 2008

Brian Orr, The Platform Virtualization Threat Environment

Fall, 2006

Joey Barrett, YAKIT: Your Awareness Kit

Spring, 2006

Joephy Hoang, Content-Based Image Retrieval

Fall, 2005

Rául Aguilar, Mixed Language Spam Detection

Spring, 2005

Prabhu Anabananthan, Job Manager Extensions for Grid Computing Frameworks

Amit Desai, The Effect of Divergent Implementations on Application Design in Real-Time Environments

Dale Kohler, Minnow: Multicast Networked Object-Based Data Store

Sinu Ranasinghe, Domain Gateway Address-Based DOS Detection Protocol

Fall, 2004

Criag Ward, Implications of Programming Language Selection on the Construction of Secure Software Systems

Akin Ajayi, Insight: A Framework for Shallow Text Mining

Spring, 2004

David Chu, Network Analysis for Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Fall, 2003

Kholoud Khateeb, Creative Author: A Visual Programming Language for Creative Multimedia Authoring

Ihimu Ukpo, Image Compression Applications of Sector Key Compression

Spring, 2002

Debbie Spiegel, Comparative Analysis of Peer-to-Peer Systems

Mike Chang, A Refined Design Pattern Classification Scheme

Fall, 2001

Wei Michael Sun, Smart Answering Management System (SAMS)

Dale Raymond P. Borja, Software Reliability: Assessment and Assurance

Sanford Weinberg, Solving the Internet Bandwidth Problem

Fall, 2000

Shouki Souri, Design and Implementation of a Framework for Visual Document Structure Editing

Robert G. Hayes, Real-time Java

Spring, 2000

Ernest Murillo, VRML Storyboarding

Fall, 1999

Arthur F. del Rosario, ?

Herng-Yi Chen, Data Compression

Fall, 1998

Cesar A. Atehortua, The Internet Access Bottleneck—Is DSL the best solution?

Chuang Kuan-Shih, Speech Technology

Fall, 1997

Mike A. Malgeri, Specification for the Addition of a Persistent File Replication Service To CORBAservices

Ray A. Bala II, Load Balancing Web Traffic on An Intranet

Neal C. Smith, Animated Application Development Under Direct3D and OpenGL

Robert T. Bauer, Demonstrating the Undecidability and Incompleteness of Peano Arithmetic with a Higher Order Logic Theorem Prover

Fall, 1996

Christine Ng, Image Recognition to Detect Cervical Cancer Cells

Spring, 1996

Baha-din Khasawneh, The Utilization of the Arabic Language in Information Systems

Daniel Cowles, An Adaptive Derivation of the LZW Compression Algorithm

Spring, 1995

Eric Shulman, Utilizing Ada Code in a Constrained Environment

Revital Elitzur, A Uniform Database Interface for Object and Schema Versioning

David Lacey, Natural Language Interface for Object Oriented Databases

Fall, 1994

Janet Howard, An Implementation of the ART-1 Neural Network of Carpenter and Grossberg

Spring, 1994

David Coca, A Fuzzy Logic Approach to Database Searching

Scott Karlin, C++ Classes for Embedded System Development

Fall, 1993

Nils Sandoy, Object Oriented Modeling and Design of Fractals

Spring, 1993

Kurt Harms, Interactive Simulator for Quasi-Static Shortest Path Routing Algorithms using Ada Concurrent Tasking

John Ralston, Use of Self-Enhancing Databases for Address Matching Systems

Fall, 1992

Alberto Velez, Real-Time System Software for Visor Displays

Robert Greayer, Separate Compilation in Language Design and Program Optimization

Teial Starks, DB++: A Language for Small-Scale Object-Oriented Databases

Dean Allingham, The Design of the Language L

Fall, 1991

Mukesh Patel, Intel 80387 Floating Point Emulation

Prior to Fall, 1990, comprehensive examinations were given in lieu of the thesis requirement.