Undergraduate Thesis
General Information
The undergraduate thesis enables students to apply and consolidate the knowledge gained during their studies. In addition, with the dissertation, students have the opportunity to get in touch with innovative areas of the IT field, to complete and specialize their knowledge in an IT field and to get in touch with the international literature and research process. In many cases, a good thesis is a strong advantage both for continuing studies at the postgraduate level as well as for entering the labour market.
Assignment
Students can undertake an undergraduate thesis when they enter the 7th semester of their studies. Its duration extends to the 7th and 8th semesters. The thesis receives 10 credits, 5 in the 7th semester and 5 in the 8th semester and is subject to restrictions that apply to the rest of the courses, i.e., in order for the thesis to be registered, the previous semesters' courses must have been passed or registered as a priority.
Each thesis is supervised by a faculty member of the Department or by an external collaborator with a supervising faculty member of the Department. To undertake a thesis, a student should, on his/her initiative, explore the possibilities of working with a potential supervisor. Graduation is done exclusively by a student. The undertaking of a thesis from two (2) or more students is not allowed.
In order to complete the undergraduate thesis, the student submits an Application (Appendix 1 in Greek) to the Secretariat and the Supervising Professor's Introductory Report of the thesis (Appendix 2 in Greek) is attached to the student's application. The Assembly of the Department is informed by the Secretariat about the application and the report for undertaking a thesis and approves or rejects the undertaking. In case of approval, the supervisor shall appropriately update the dissertation attendance file, which shall state the title of the dissertation, the name of the supervisor, co-supervisor (if any), the name of the student, the date of the assignment and the date of delivery.
Completion
The thesis must be completed within 9 months of the approval of the assignment by the Assembly. In special cases, the supervisor has the option to extend this period to 12 months. In case of an extension, the supervisor is obliged to enter the date given the extension and the new delivery date in the thesis attendance file. If the period of 9 or 12 months has passed and the thesis has not been completed, then it is cancelled and the student is looking for a new thesis.
After 5 months from the assignment of the thesis, the student submits a progress report to the Supervisor based on which the Supervisor approves the continuation of the undergraduate thesis or its rejection.
Upon completion of the thesis, the Supervisor prepares and sends to the secretariat a Thesis Examination Service Note (Appendix 3 in Greek) stating the date of the dissertation examination, the place of examination and the members of the three-member Examination Committee.
Examination
Under the responsibility of the supervisor, a three-member examination committee is appointed in which the Supervisor and Co-Supervisor (if any) and faculty members of the department participate. During the examination, the three-member Committee evaluates:
· The presentation of the dissertation (10% of the final grade).
· The authorship of the dissertation (30% of the final grade).
· The content that includes the research value, the difficulty, the code that may have been developed, etc. (60% of the final grade).
Then, the Examination Committee completes the document Graduation Thesis Score (Appendix 4 in Greek) and the document is delivered to the Secretariat.
In case the thesis is evaluated negatively, the student is invited to start from the beginning of the process of taking an undergraduate thesis with another Supervising Professor.
Proposed Thesis Structure
Title
The title of the dissertation should be in Greek and English.
Copyright declaration
On the second page should be placed the following intellectual property declaration, where XXXX is the year of thesis submission:
Copyright @ XXXXX Computer Science Department, International Hellenic University,
The content of this Thesis is the intellectual property of the author (s), the supervising professor and the Department of Informatics of IHU and is protected by copyright laws (Law 2121/1993 and rules of International Law in force in GREECE).
Statement of academic ethics
The following statement should be placed on the third page:
Fully aware of the consequences of copyright law, I declare that I am the sole author of this Thesis, for the completion of which any assistance is fully recognized and detailed in the dissertation. I have cited in full and with clear references all sources of data usage, views, positions and suggestions, ideas and verbal references, either literally or based on scientific paraphrasing. I assume my personal and individual responsibility that in the case of failure to implement the above-stated data, I am liable to plagiarism, which means failure in my thesis and consequently failure to obtain a Degree, in addition to the other consequences of copyright law. I declare, therefore, that this Thesis was prepared and completed personally and exclusively by me and that, I fully undertake all the consequences of the law if it is proven, over time, that this work or part of it does not belong to me because it is a product of plagiarism of other intellectual property.
Acknowledgements
It is common to include acknowledgements in the thesis to those who helped in any way in their completion.
Summary
This is the summary of the dissertation in order for the reader to understand the topic or topics that the thesis deals with. After the end of the summary, you should provide the scientific area of the work and 5 keywords. The maximum summary size is limited to one (1) page.
Abstract
This is a summary translated into English.
Table of Contents
If MS Word or any other similar software is used, the sections and subsections can be written using the provided styles to automatically create the table of contents. Otherwise, it will be difficult to build and maintain the table of contents.
List of Figures
It lists all the Figures used in the thesis with hierarchical numbering (example in the provided thesis Template in Greek).
List of Tables
It lists all the Tables used in the thesis with hierarchical numbering (example in the provided thesis Template in Greek).
Chapter 1 : Introduction
In this introductory chapter, after a brief introduction that summarizes the topic of the dissertation, there should be all the research you have done on the internet, from books and scientific papers to find similar systems, material related to the dissertation, software applications, algorithms, etc. depending on the nature of the thesis.
· This chapter should therefore mention what others have done (with references) about the topics covered in the dissertation as well as the research that has been done on the hardware and / or software used during its elaboration.
· At the end of this chapter student shall briefly present the theoretical concepts on which the thesis was based as well as the material and / or software developed concerning everything previously written in this chapter.
· The introduction is completed with a brief presentation about the structure of the rest of the thesis / chapter.
Chapter 2 : Theoretical Background
This chapter shall present in detail and with references a) the methods, algorithms and techniques used by you if they have been proposed or used by other scientists and their comparative advantages. b) Describe if you propose any methods, algorithms or techniques which have been developed during the preparation of the work.
Chapter 3 : System Description (Hardware)
In case the thesis includes hardware development, in addition to software development, this chapter should describe in detail the used hardware, the developed hardware and any information that is related to this hardware, e.g. microcontroller type, signal processing, etc. This chapter should provide all the necessary information (images, shapes, connections, blueprints, etc.) about the implemented system to enable someone to rebuild it.
This chapter is obviously not necessary if the dissertation only concerns the development of a software application.
Chapter 4 : Software Description
· Choice of programming languages and why?
· What does the software do (low and / or high level)? Requirements. Standards. Diagrams e.g. UML such as use case diagrams, class diagrams, or state diagrams.
· How does the software do it? Some examples
· Presentation of small representative parts of code and explanation of their operation (with internal documentation)
· Description of application windows, presentation of prints, tables with operating states, etc.
Chapter 5 : Testing of good operation - Results of Use - Experimental results
This chapter should provide evaluation examples about the system operation and use providing photos and tables with results and diagrams. Various measurements and experimental results should also be presented depending on the nature of the thesis, e.g. response time measurements, success / failure rates, etc.
Chapter 6 : Conclusions - Future Proposals
This chapter presents the conclusions from the elaboration of the thesis (what happened, the pros and cons as well as the problems that were presented and how they were solved). Additionally, there are presented future suggestions for improvements, changes and additions that can be made, thus giving the impetus for the continuation of the thesis by another interested student.
References
This is a list of references. For each item in this list, there should be at least one reference in the thesis text. Information on how to complete the bibliographic references can be found in the thesis writing template that accompanies this guide.
Appendix 1. Instructions for installation, operation and use of the whole system (hardware and software)
Instructions and a user manual for the system administrator and user.
Appendix 2. The commented implementation code