-Your Name Here-

-Your Name Here-

Student ID: -your ID here-

Project Title: -Your project title here-

Course Name: -full name of your course (e.g. MSc Computer Networking)-

MSc Project Final Report

School of Computer Science and Technology

Supervisor: -your supervisors name-

Academic Year: -insert academic year (e.g. 2023/2024) remove the yellow highlights in this page-

Abstract

The abstract should be a concise summary of the study, identifying the nature and scope, the major findings and the contribution to the overall field of the subject. Abstracts give the reader an overview and feel for the work without first having to study the whole project. The abstract must be succinct (not exceeding 200 words) and clearly written. It is important to note that the abstract is not an introduction.

Keywords

You need to supply key words and/or phrases so that researchers can locate the project by means of searches. The total number of key words must not exceed eight.

Acknowledgements

This section should be used to state the names of the individuals who provided substantial help. Do not forget the supervisor!!

Dedication

The author usually dedicates the project to their family, parents, or whomever they choose. This decision is left to the individual.

Table of Contents

Type chapter title (level 1)1

Type chapter title (level 2)2

Type chapter title (level 3)3

Type chapter title (level 1)4

Type chapter title (level 2)5

Type chapter title (level 3)6

Table of Figures

CHAPTER 1: Introduction

Introduction is always the first chapter and informs the reader about the nature of the artefact, the project, the aim and objectives. It should put the work into context, including history and the background to the study. The introduction presents a broad general development of the work covered in the project.

Even though you have provided an overview of your project in Abstract, it is important to give it here in more details. Try addressing the following questions:

What are you producing as a project outcome(s)? Describe your artefact.

Why are you producing that? Why is it worth? What novel is it bringing?

What are your aims and objectives?

What is the structure of your report?

The introduction should consist of sections enumerated as below.

Aims

Explain your aims in more details.

Objectives

Explain your objectives in more details.

Artefact Description

Describe your artefact at a high-level. You will have a chance to describe it in detail later in the report.

Thesis Structure

Briefly describe the upcoming chapters and what they will be presenting.

Feel free to modify the sections in this chapter and also to add subsections if needed. If you are adding subsections, enumerate them following the same pattern.

Recall the provided chapter titles are only there as an example and you can modify them as suitable for your work and thesis. Remove all yellow highlights before submitting your report.

CHAPTER 2: Literature Review

You should analyse in detail the state-of-the-art literature relevant for your project. Use scientific / academic peer reviewed literature items at the first place, not older than 5 years. Use also technical / white reports or independent review pages that analyse available technologies, products and services. Avoid using general pages, such as Wikipedia, that do not normally get through thorough peer review.

Try to present first a bigger picture on the topic of your project. Extract a collection of literature items useful to present the background of your work and analyse each to highlight advantages and disadvantages of the presented competitive methods and solutions. Then, build on top the identified disadvantages so that you clearly explain how your solution will resolve them.

Use referencing (Harvard style)! Do not copy-paste!

Try to structure this chapter into sections. The first section can be an introduction to the literature review and, then, you can divide the review into logical sections following the background fields you are researching.

CHAPTER 3: Research Methodology

How did you carry out your research? How did you collect the data (if any), research for existing solutions, design new solutions and run experiments? Recall that the focus here is on how you run your research, not on what you researched.

Try to justify the choices you made above. Why did you decide to run the research as explained above?

Also, explain how you applied project management. How did you ensure the proposed project plan was running on time and how did you manage unplanned obstructions?

Feel free to structure this chapter into sections and subsections, if needed.

CHAPTER 4: Design / Development / Implementation

Choose the title of this chapter appropriately. Depending if you want to put emphasis on novelty in design of the solution or development methods or implementation, choose the chapter title to reflect that. You can also use more words in the title to be more specific about the project outcome what novel have you designed, developed or implemented?

Be very specific in this chapter. This is the main place where you are explaining the details of your artefact. Be also very specific about the design choices you made whenever you decided to make a component of the artefact in the way you did, explain why you chose so. Have you run relevant literature research that suggests your choice would give the best results? Or have you run multiple experiments that showed your selection will be optimal? In any case, provide detailed description how you reached the choices.

Use structure in this chapter. Sections and subsections are expected because this is the core of your dissertation. Use pictures, graphs and diagrams they are more worth than just words.

CHAPTER 5: Testing / Results / Evaluation

Once your solution has been implemented, as explained in the previous chapter, you should now present how you have tested it. Did it achieve what you expected? Did you collect data for testing? If so, present how you collected the data and why you decided to collect the data in the way you presented. If your artefact does not work as expected, what did you do to repair it or what kind of backup approach did you select?

Did you repeatedly run your designed artefact with different sets of data? Did you collect various results as a part of evaluation of your project artefact? How did you choose evaluation strategy? In which conditions were you running experiments? Describe this in detail. Evaluation is very important part that is often omitted in student reports. Evaluation should present comparative performance analysis how well your solution works as compared to the state-of-the-art? Is it better in some aspects and worse in other way? If so, be specific which aspects are good and which need improvements. Use quantitative metrics, so you can compare straightforwardly. Use comparative graphs, tables, diagrams.

Feel free to rename this chapter accordingly depending on where you want to put your emphasis where most novelty and contribution is located. Feel also free to break this and the previous chapter into more chapters, if needed to keep a balance of content among them avoid having one chapter huge in length and content and another very short.

CHAPTER 6: Discussion / Conclusions

Discuss the findings from the previous chapters. Especially, discuss the findings from the evaluation part. That should give a thorough analysis of the quality and novelty your solution achieved. Also, that should give a clear picture what remains challenging in your solution, so that it can be improved in the future.

Provide conclusions summary of what you have achieved / made, what lessons you have learnt during the project work (this relates to the technical subject knowledge, not general lessons). What are your recommendations in the researched field?

What are your insights on the future work? How should the artefact be improved further to become even better? If you had more time / money / resources / collaborators, how would you proceed with the work? What is your message to potential colleagues who might be starting the same work how to do things differently?

References

List of references should go here. The Harvard style should be used (check https://lrweb.beds.ac.uk/a-guide-to-referencing). Each literature item you add to the list has to be somewhere cited throughout your report you cannot just add an item to the list without citation.

You are allowed to borrow ideas or results from previous research. However, you must rephrase and reference the original work. Do not copy-paste! That would be a plagiarism and misconduct!

Appendices

Appendices should be used for additional, non-essential supporting information. The core essential content should still go in the main body of your report, not in the appendices.

Each appendix should be clearly annotated (A, B, C, etc.) and referenced in the main body text. Each appendix should be connected to the main text as a supporting information.

Examples of what can be put in appendices: source code (only if it plays an important role in developing your artefact), questionnaire that you might have used for user survey, longer mathematical derivation (if any) or user manual for your artefact.

Structure your appendices like sections, but use alphabetical indexing:

Appendix A

This is the first appendix that is cited in the main text.

Appendix B

This is the second appendix that is cited in the main text.