Thesis Policies

You must follow all department deadlines (including those for proposing projects, selecting an orals board, and submitting the thesis document on time). Departmental Deadlines and Instructions are on the Moodle.

Meetings & Communication

You must regularly attend group and individual meetings. Regular communication is essential for a successful thesis. Sometimes meetings might not need to happen (e.g., if students want to take that time to work) - you must email me to check in about missing a meeting to do thesis work elsewhere.

Reschedule regular meetings if a conflict arises. Scheduled travel, illness, or other conflicts might prevent all from attending the meetings. As soon as you know you cannot make a meeting, notify the others in the meeting and set a plan to reschedule. If you cannot reschedule the meeting, then you should email your progress to me. If I cannot make a meeting, I will reach out to you and do the same.

Use of Generative AI

Generative AI is technology that is trained to generate text, images, or code from natural language prompts. Two examples of generative AI that you might have seen before are ChatGPT (which returns text based on prompts) and GitHub Copilot (which returns code based on prompts). This AI policy is designed for you to use AI to help you carry out your thesis, but not do the work for you. You may also choose to not use generative AI at all. Refer to this handy Glossary of AI Uses.

All use of AI must be clearly acknowledged in the thesis document. If you use generative AI like you would use Google, you do not need to acknowledge it.

New this Year: You should have an acknowledgement of AI use in your thesis document, where you either state that AI was not used or you explain the extent of generative AI use in your thesis process.

Code

Depending on the goals of your thesis, it might be acceptable to use generative AI to assist in writing code for your thesis. Some examples are using generative AI to identify errors in your code, using it to understand what a piece of code is doing, or provide other technical guidance. Whenever you take code from generative AI prompts, you must understand what the code does - in many cases code provided from generative AI contains errors. This understanding must be documented as comments in your code.

The Thesis Document

Everyone must write a thesis document. This document represents your work, your results, and your conclusions, all in your writing style. When you write papers, you are claiming the words and the ideas within them as your own. In order to demonstrate the learning objective that you have written a coherent document, it needs to be in your words.

  • You may not use generative AI to compose any part of your thesis document. For example, you cannot copy and paste any generated text into your document.
  • Before you write your draft, you may use generative AI to suggest potential literature and to help organize your thoughts in the planning/outlining phase.
  • After you have written a draft, when you send it to me for review, you may also use generative AI to proofread, to suggest phrasing improvements, and to refine style.

Acknowledging Code & Software Written by Others

For many thesis projects, students may need to turn to other tools and software. This depends heavily on the scope and goals of your thesis project.

  • If you use any code you found online in your own programs (such as from StackOverflow, or other sites), you must acknowledge this in your code - include the author, a brief description, and the URL.
  • If you use tools from other groups, you will also acknowledge these in your thesis. Typically, tools have an accompanying paper that you should cite.