Your MSc Dissertation must include:

• Title Page
• Executive Summary
• Other necessary stuff
• Abstract
• Main body
• Reference
• (Appendix)

Usually between 45-60 pages (excluding the appendix)

no firm formatting requirements

• standard font
• suitable font size (11-12)
• numbering (pages, chapters, sections, equations, tables, figures,…)
• good design (visually appealing tables and figures)

1 page. See pp9 in the Guidelines.

No more than 6 pages. Recommended 2-3 pages.

clearly, succinctly, and non-technical (if possible).

The Executive Summary should cover:

• Background to the scientific problem and why.
• How you approached the problem.
• Key findings and conclusions
• Recommendations and the benefits

• Acknowledgements

  • 1 page

• Table of Contents

  • 1-2 pages

• Table of Figures

  • 1-2 pages

No more than 300 words.

• short version of executive summary
• a quick description of what is covered in the dissertation
• see the checklist in the Guidelines

1-3 chapters.

• background about the general area
• Define/propose the research problem
• background/motivation about the specific research problem
• existing literature (how people resolve the problem)

What else should be included?

• Organisation of the dissertation

• The important works (milestones) in the general topic
• Existing works in the your specific (and relevant) research problem
• The most relevant works (you are studying or comparing with), and works directly link to them
• Other relevant works
• The recent development
• The applications in other fields
• ……

1-3 (or more) chapters.

This is usually the most flexible part in your dissertation.

Keys:

• self-contained
• use explicit, clear, and simple formulas/terms
• consistency in notations
• write in your own words and logic

1-2 (or more) chapters. Typical types of numerical studies are:

[1]. Monte Carlo simulations (synthetic data)

+ generate data repeatedly under pre-specified settings
+ apply the method and report the results (relative to the true settings)
+ compare with competitors*

[2]. Real data applications

+ background/story
+ pre-processing
+ report the results and try to interpret

Use informative tables and figures (visualization).

This could be the major chapters if you are doing a application-focused dissertation.

What you could include in the conclusions:

• summarise your dissertation
• outline your contribution, discuss the key results/learning outcome
• limitations of the dissertation/studied methodology
• any possible future improvement/directions

• Standard and Consistent style (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard)
• preferably in alphabetical order

• Davies, R. B. (1977). Hypothesis testing when a nuisance parameter is present only under the alternative. Biometrika, 64, 247–254.

If a paper is a preprint (on arXiv):

• Lugosi, G. and Mendelson, S. (2016). Risk minimization by median-of-means tourna- ments. arXiv preprint, arXiv:1608.00757.

A book:

• Huber, P. J. (1981). Robust Statistics. Wiley, New York.

Chapters in a book:

• Vershynin, R. (2012). Introduction to the non-asymptotic analysis of random matrices. In Compressed Sensing 210–268. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

• Yang, L., Zhan, X., Chen, D., Yan, J., Chen, C, and Lin, D. (2019). Learning to cluster faces on an affinity graph. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2298–2306.

• lecture notes
• tutorials
• web/internet references (articles/websites/Wikipedia…)
• ……

It is allowed although not recommended to cite above types of reference, .

In general, we should only trust scientific works that has been peer-reviewed.

Contains supplementary material that is not an essential part of the dissertation, but may provide comprehensive information.

It could contain, for example:

• Codes
• Proofs or Auxiliary Lemmas (if they are not the main contribution in your dissertation)
• Additional numerical results
• ……

• in your own words/notations

• in formal academic style:

  • complete sentences
  • no contractions
  • no colloquialisms or slang
  • no imprecise statements

• present tense should generally be used

• do not use “I” or “you”.

• UK English spelling

• Read literature (academic papers) and try to mimic their writing style/organisation
• Read the Guidelines
• I will provide a latex/Word template (towards the end of this month)
• Start writting as early as possible