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. However, if a company where we have had no prior interaction, do not know anybody whom we trust, have no prior positive experience, then we expect that company fund one person month of a PhD student, such that one member of our team can spend ~15-35% of his or her monthly time on the thesis top compensate if the company does not live up to our expectations. If the company really wants you for your thesis and does not see you as a stooge, they will fund that person month. Please have your company contact directly contact Jan Peters. Below are some potential advisors at companies who are exempted from that supervision funding requirement!

Current Admissible Potential Co-Advisors in Industry

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 groups of our alumni Julia Vinogradska and Felix Berkenkamp 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.
  • At Porsche, we are always happy to send good students to Peter van Vliet.
  • At VW in Munich, we have had great experiences with Philip Becker-Ehmck, Alexandros Paraschos and Patrick van der Smagt.
  • At BMW, we are starting a collaboration right now with Patrick Lanners and colleagues.

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.

FAQ on External Theses

We help with external theses as part of our “good parenting” strategy. We can help ppl who want to go to another country or have a lower entry barier at a company. We get nothing in return except for the knowledge to have helped “our guys”. Here are a few common questions on external theses:

  1. How do I choose an external thesis? Tell us what research topics (close to our research) are important for you and what prior research experience you have on them. We help you with the details.
  2. Can I choose a company/external collaborator? No, to be a successful external thesis, the most important part is that you care about the topic. Tell us what research topics (close to our research) are important for you and what prior research experience you have on them. We subsequently suggest companies/external collaborator and approach them for you to see if they currently have capacity.
  3. What about going abroad? We have outstanding collaborators in many countries. As we only send good students full of drive, they have had an amazing time in many places including the USA, France, the UK and Japan.
  4. When is it a good idea to do a MSc thesis in industry? If you feel you want to work on a particular topic but focus on practical applications, ideally directly work towards a job offer at this company or a competitor, it makes a lot of sense to go for it.
  5. Do I have to move there? If you ask that question, you do not want to do an external thesis. The whole point of an external thesis is to go to another campus.
  6. Do you also support theses in other companies? No, only if we had prior exposure through joint projects, collaborations or funding. Note that we have had bad experience with many companies that search for MSc students but are not good at offering MSc theses and it backfires for the poor student who gets a bad thesis, bad grades and is abused as cheap workforce. We want to avoid that situation! Thus, we have a process to help students find good advisors in good companies who care and whom we trust.
  7. I am not a student at TU Darmstadt, am I also eligible? No! 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.
  8. Does it help if I am on Jan Peters' Top Student List? Of course, our friends know your value!