Guidelines for writing a thesis

These guidelines are useful to proficiently write a thesis with the team of professor Prandini. It is YOUR DUTY to remember your deadlines - i.e. title upload, thesis upload, etc.

Writing the thesis

We ask you to write the thesis using LaTeX: it is a MANDATORY requirement to use our template included in your repository. You can not put the university logo on yuor thesis. We suggest you to use Overleaf as you LaTeX editor. In your thesis, it is mandatory to include:

  • bibliography: use \cite to include the bibliography using Biblatex a good guide how to make bibliography.
  • table of acronyms: you can use the glossaries library - to create it use \usepackage[acronym]{glossaries}. You can add a new acronym by using \newacronym{nameofacronym}{ACRONIM}{Name of acronym} and then insert \acrfull{nameofacronym} OR \acrshort{nameofacronym} to insert it.
  • code: include code excerpts to explain better some technical points, but try to minimize the use of it.
  • figures: not too big or unreadable. Everytime you use a figure or a portion of code you did not create, cite the reference. Each image or code you insert, must be referenced explicitly in the text. Verify that you did not provide broken URLs in the bibliography.

Structure of the thesis

Usually, an experimental thesis has six chapters:

  1. Introduction: which sums up what you did in the thesis;
  2. State of the art: which sums up the technologies you are using and the domain you are tackling;
  3. Project Analisys: which sums up your goal and what are the building blocks to reach it;
  4. Implementation: which sums up your implementation steps to solve your problems. Highlight the difficulties you had during this phase and how you solved them (or not);
  5. Results: which sum up your numerical results, use graphs and specify the hardware and software in which you ran your tests;
  6. Conclusions: which sum up your results and interpretation of them and provide a vision on how you would further develop your thesis in the future.

Sending your thesis draft

Use a spell checker to avoid mispellings before sending your thesis! Always use the mailing list netsecresearch [at] live.unibo.it to send your thesis. We suggest you to send a complete version of your thesis draft to receive a complete feedback. Note: send the thesis AT LEAST 3 weeks before the deadline, or you will not be guaranteed to have it reviewed in time.

Presentation

Bachelor presentations are REQUIRED to be less than 7 minutes, while Master presentations are REQUIRED to be maximum 12 minutes, so arrange your talk to suit the time. We suggest you export your presentation in PDF, for OS compatibility. Remember to NEVER put the university logo on the presentation. Try to have a 5-6 slides long presentation, and minimize the words used in the slides.