External Bachelor and Master Theses

External theses can sometimes be an important enrichment of student careers as well as highly beneficial to both the student and IAS group members. However, quite frequently, we have seen that companies and other universities have exploited thesis students, offered scientifically poor topics and insufficient supervision. Therefore, we only offer external bachelor and master theses if we are absolutely certain that the student will profit from doing this thesis. Typically, that requires that we know the involved PIs of the host institution no matter whether it is a university, company or research institute. For companies, we typically require some form of joint funding or long-term projects before we entrust them with our precious students. Do not worry, we do know most thesis advisors who are doing interesting work in our area and we would never send you to someone boring.

Potential Advisors

If you are interested in doing a thesis abroad, at a top research institute or at a company, we are happy to connect you with one of our collaborators. The following PIs are well-known to us as outstanding supervisors for Master and Bachelor theses as well as internships, we have send students to them several times with only positive experience for us and the involved students and they are actively searching for top students:

• The research group of Haitham Bou Ammar at Huawei London Research Centre offers an outstanding environment for theses on real-world reinforcement learning, Bayesian and combinatorial optimisation, especially applied to problems related to self-driving, chip design, and antibody discovery. The goal is to signify the usefulness of machine learning beyond well-behaved simulators and environments.
• The research group of Michael Gienger at Honda Research Institute Europe in Offenbach offers an outstanding environment for theses on robotics, especially in the fields of human-robot interaction and robot learning.
• The research group of Dieter Büchler at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. This group is a great place for robot learning in soft muscular systems.
• The research group of Julia Vinogradska at Bosch Centre for Artificial Intelligence (BCAI) in Renningen offers an outstanding environment for theses in Bayesian optimization and model-based Reinforcement Learning with focus on safety and data efficiency. Typical applications for our research results are in the automotive and manufacturing domains that pose additional, interesting challenges beyond toy problems and simulator environments.
• Also located at the Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence, the research group of Bastian Bischoff is working on deep learning based perception for applications such as automated driving, manufacturing, and healthcare. We offer a great industrial research environment for theses in the fields of (automated) design of network architectures, novel building blocks for deep vision models, robust deep learning (e.g., robustness against adversarial perturbations and natural distortions) and temporal processing in deep neural networks.

If you are interested in doing a thesis with any person on this list, please send an email to Jan Peters including your CV and current transcripts. Suited candidates (especially students from the IAS Top Students List) will be forwarded to these collaborators. Note: Some of these theses may be offered jointly will well-paid student jobs.

Note: This page is about external bachelor and master students theses only for TU Darmstadt students. For outstanding non-TU Darmstadt students, we exceptionally offer Internal Theses as well, but such students need to contact Jan Peters by jan.peters@tu-darmstadt.de in order to be considered.