Bachelor and Master Thesis
General Information
Our team offers bachelor and master thesis topics to be written in English. There are quarterly info sessions where we explain the process of writing a thesis with our team.
Last info session took place on October 26th, 2022. Here you can find the slides and the recording of the session.
For the current topic list, see below. Furthermore, find here a summary of guidelines for working on your thesis with us.
Important Dates
26.10.2022: Info session
03.11.2022: Expression of interest
04.11.2022: Topic assignment
15.12.2022: Official start
Formatting
Please consider the following hints and guidelines for working on your thesis:
- The thesis has to be written using the \documentclass[preprint,review,12pt]{elsarticle} Latex template. You can use the overleaf template for writing your thesis.
-
A bachelor thesis has a page limit of 40 pages of text (not including cover, table of content, references, appendices).
-
A master thesis has a page limit of 80 pages of text (not including cover, table of content, references, appendices).
Prerequisites
The candidate is expected to be familiar with the general rules of writing a scientific paper. Some general references are helpful for framing any thesis, no matter which topic:
- Wil van der Aalst: How to Write Beautiful Process and Data Science Papers? Archive Report (2022).
-
Jan Recker: Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide . Springer, Heidelberg, Germany (2021).
-
Jan Mendling, Benoit Depaire, Henrik Leopold: Theory and Practice of Algorithm Engineering . Archive Report (2021).
-
Claes Wohlin, Pär Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, Anders Wesslén Experimentation in software engineering . Springer Science & Business Media (2012).
-
Ken Peffers, Tuure Tuunanen, Marcus A. Rothenberger, Samir Chatterjee: A Design Science Research Methodology for Information Systems Research . J of Management Information Systems 24(3): 45-77 (2008).
-
Barbara Kitchenham, Rialette Pretorius, David Budgen, Pearl Brereton, Mark Turner, Mahmood Niazi, Stephen G. Linkman: Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A tertiary study . Information & Software Technology 52(8): 792-805 (2010).
-
Lagendijk, Ad. Survival Guide for Scientists: Writing, Presentation, Email . Amsterdam University Press (2008).
-
Adam LeBrocq: Journal of the Association for Information Systems Style Guide. http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/JAIS_Style_Guide_2013.pdf
In agreement with the supervisor an individual list of expected readings should be studied by the student in preparation of the actual work on the thesis.
Grading
The grading of the thesis takes various criteria into account, relating both to the thesis as a product and the process of establishing its content. These include, but are not limited to:
-
Correctness of spelling and grammar
-
Aesthetic appeal of documents and figures
-
Compliance with formal rules
-
Appropriateness of thesis structure
-
Coverage of relevant literature
-
Appropriateness of research question and method
-
Diligence of own research work
-
Significance of research results
-
Punctuality of work progress
-
Proactiveness of handling research progress
Recent Topics
If you are interested in one of the following topics, please send an email expressing your interest to Dr. Saimir Bala (firstname[dot]lastname[at]hu-berlin.de). Please explain why this topic is interesting for you and how it fits your prior studies. Also explain what are your strengths in your studies and in which semester of your studies you are.
The next deadline is 3 November 2022.
Topic 1: Visual Analytics of Waiting Times for Process Mining
Process mining is a family of analysis techniques that takes event sequence data as input and generates meaningful visual representations for analysts. So far, the analysis of waiting times has been limited in prior research. The goal of this thesis is to review contributions that explicitly show the timeline of event, identify opportunities for improvement and implement and evaluate a new visualization technique.
References:
- Aigner, W., Miksch, S., Schumann, H., & Tominski, C.: Visualization of time-oriented data. Springer Science & Business Media, 2011.
- van der Aalst, WMP: Process Mining , 2nd edition. Springer Verlag, 2016.
Topic 2: Investigating process mining use case constellations: Design of a vignette study
Process Mining enables organization to analyse business processes in a multitude of ways in order to discover, validate, enhance, or monitor their actual execution. Based on the use case, organisations face the challenge of deciding how to leverage process mining in the best possible way. For instance, they need to decide which perspectives (e.g., control-flow, case, time, or organizational), contextual level (e.g., case, process, social, external), or usage type (ad-hoc, repeated, or standard) is most beneficial for their strategic objective.
The goal of this thesis is to develop and conduct a survey (target audience are process mining experts and middle-to higher management) that investigates which process mining use case constellations are utilized in organizations and why they were chosen. As a potential setup, students can follow the study design of Kollmer et al. who conducted a quantitative vignette study.
References:
- Van Der Aalst, W., 2016. Process mining: data science in action (Vol. 2). Heidelberg: Springer.
- Pfahlsberger, L., Mendling, J. and A Eckhardt, 2021. Design of a process mining alignment method for building big data analytics capabilities. In Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.
- Kollmer, T., Eckhardt, A. and Reibenspiess, V., 2022. Explaining consumer suspicion: insights of a vignette study on online product reviews. Electronic Markets, pp.1-18.
Topic 4: Analyzing File Evolution Trends for Predicting Development Task Completion
Topic 5: Reconstructing the Process Mining Ecosystem - the Case of Celonis
Organizations cannot be viewed in isolation. Moreover, they are embedded inside a complex ecosystem of competitors, suppliers, customers, governments, and many more. Over time, organizations inside this ecosystem are subject to certain mimetic pressures that lead to unintentional or intentional changes, which in turn can lead to reciprocal imitation – Especially in dynamic and emerging areas like the process mining industry. Mimetic pressures lead to the prevalence of certain practices that seemingly caused success within the focal organization’s industry because those organizations follow the same goals, resources, customers, human capital or experience similar constraints.
Currently, the process mining ecosystem is characterized by a relatively homogenous constellation with many organizations that implemented a similar technological foundation, serve the same group of customers, and select the same kind of strategic partnerships. This thesis (Master thesis is favoured) has the goal to reconstruct the history of the ecosystem behind the market leading process mining vendor Celonis and find answers why Celonis favoured certain actions over others in order to be successful.
References:
- Shahzad Ansari, Raghu Garud, and Arun Kumaraswamy. The disruptor’s dilemma: Tivo and the us television ecosystem. Strategic Management Journal, 37(9):1829–1853, 2016.
- DiMaggio, P.J.; Powell, W.W. (1983): The iron cage revisited: institutional isomorphism an collective rationality in organizational fields. American Sociological Review 48, 147-160.
- Wil MP van der Aalst. On the representational bias in process mining. In 2011 IEEE 20th International Workshops on Enabling Technologies: Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises, pages 2–7. IEEE, 2011.
- Bernhard Lingens, Lucas Miehé, and Oliver Gassmann. The ecosystem blueprint: How firms shape the design of an ecosystem according to the surrounding conditions. Long Range Planning, page 102043, 2020.
Topic 6: Multi-Dimensional Process Analysis on Software Data
Software processes are complex as they involve multiple actors and data which interplay with one another over time. Process science is the discipline that studies processes. Works in this area are already using multi-dimensional analyses approaches to provide new insights in business processes that go beyond the discovery of control-flow via process mining. For instance, these new techniques allow to explain reasons why certain activities are a bottleneck by analyzing at the same time various perspectives such as case, time, resources and control-flow. The aim of this thesis is to explore the applicability of multi-dimensional process analysis on data from software development.
References:
- Fahland, Dirk. "Process mining over multiple behavioral dimensions with event knowledge graphs." Process Mining Handbook. Springer, Cham, 2022. 274-319.
- Esser, Stefan, and Dirk Fahland. "Multi-dimensional event data in graph databases." Journal on Data Semantics 10.1 (2021): 109-141.
- AlMarzouq, Mohammad, Abdullatif AlZaidan, and Jehad AlDallal. "Mining GitHub for research and education: challenges and opportunities." International Journal of Web Information Systems (2020).