Contact person for industry: Roger Johansson ( roger ( a ) chalmers.se )

Many of our students conduct their thesis project in collaboration with a company / external organization.

Please respect that we strongly recommend students to work in pairs. They can pair up with students from any other master´s program at Chalmers or GU. But it is not possible to formally collaborate with students from other universities for administrative reasons.

Most students at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) do their master´s thesis during the spring term. Students have to apply for a thesis project by writing a proposal to be submitted at certain deadlines. Some programs offer writing courses that include proposal writing, those are usually conducted during reading period 2, i.e., November-December.

If you want to suggest projects for students staring their thesis work in January, you should ideally provide those during October-November. (A minor percentage of students starts at other times of the year, therefore we welcome project suggestions at any time of the academic year.)

A project description

should be short, an equivalent of 1-2 A4 pages in total,
should contain a title, a short description of the task, and possibly the background for the task,
may state a research questions (if it does not, then the student will have to formulate the question),
may include short information about the company / external organization,
may contain links to additional material such as scientific publications or technical reports,
clearly states contact information such as name and email address,
is written in English.

For master level thesis, plain (re-)implementation projects will not be admitted. There must be a component that ensures contribution to research and development work. Further, the task must fit within the scope of the master program and it must build on advanced knowledge. Even if your project idea does not fulfill all of the above mentioned points, the project could still be interesting for bachelor level projects or projects in the program högskoleingenjör. Contact the master´s thesis support for further information.

If the project is admitted, the student will have a supervisor at the company (called advisor or mentor), an academic supervisor from Chalmers/GU and an examiner assigned by the department of CSE. We strongly recommend to have at least two joint meetings for the advisor, supervisor and student(s) during the thesis work.

The examiner is the sole judge if the project has met the requirements of a master´s thesis project, see clarification of roles of examiner, supervisor and advisor. The master´s thesis report handed in to the department must contain all information necessary to judge the quality of result of the project. Thesis reports are published in the library´s database.

From a company offering a master´s project, we expect

that you offer access to necessary hardware, software and data sets by the start of the project,
that you offer a work place, if possible,
that you assign an advisor who is available for questions and guidance on a day-by-day basis, if needed,
that you choose an advisor that matches the needs of the project, ideally with prior experience of supervision. The advisor possesses substantial knowledge about the problem domain, and, in the ideal case, also good knowledge about the methods to be used in the project.

Please observe that the final thesis report will be public. The thesis report needs to contain enough details so that the examiner can judge if the student has reached the course goals, so it is not an option to keep the data or the results secret in order to protect the company´s interest. This issue is especially important for thesis projects within Data Science and AI. Teachers do not sign non-disclosure agreements, and we advice students not to do so either.

The department reserves itself the right to terminate a project if an external part does not fulfill the requirements, e.g., if access to necessary data sets is not granted in time.

Chalmers central has now re-installed the Exjobbsportalen. Both industry representatives and staff from Chalmers and GU can use the page to upload project suggestions.