Zoi Kaoudi

Below you will find some guidelines for writing your research project report or Bsc/Msc thesis. Given that your project involves coding, there are no requirements on the number of pages. What is important is that an external reader can understand about the problem you tried solved, its importance, how you solved it, and why you solved it that way.

First, make sure your manuscript contains the following elements:

• Introduction: it should contain the motivation behind your project: context, problem, brief state-of-the-art description.
• Background/Preliminaries: it should contain the foundation that is necessary for the reader to be able to understand your solution.
• Related work: it should state-of-the-art works that aim at solving the same problem but follow a different approach. It is not sufficient to just list and describe the state-of-the-art but you should also contrast with your solution.
• Solution: here you should describe your approach to solving the problem described in a previous stage in the thesis. You can also add a paragraph on limitations if that makes sense.
• Experimental evaluation/Validation: it should contain some validation of your implementation and ideally a comparison with the state-of-the-art approaches.
• Conclusions+Future Work: it should contain a summary and future work. It can also contain lessons learnt as part of the conclusion.

Below is a list of some common things to note when writing:

• Avoid using passive voice. Be precise.
• Avoid having paragraphs consisting of a single sentence.
• Avoid writing long sentences. As a rule of thumb, a sentence should be maximum 3-4 lines.
• Use capital in nouns preceeding a number, e.g., "in Figure x", "in Section x", "Chapter x". When you mention it without the number, use it with a lowercase, e.g., "in the previous figure".
• Do not use figures, tables, etc. without referencing them in the text.
• Tables caption should go above the table and figures caption below the figure.
• Do not use single subsections inside sections, or sections inside chapters. For example, it makes no sense to have a Section 2 with just one subsection 2.1.
• Font size of figures should generally seem the same as the text size, worst case as the footnote size (needs to be readable in paper).
• Use explicit space before citation. In latex, use it like this: "in~\cite{ref}".