Ask HN: What was your thesis topic? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What was your thesis topic?

12 pointsacesubido8 comments

I've asked this to some of my friends and co-workers, and I found out a lot of interesting things from them. Anyone care to share theirs? I'll start off with mine:

Course: IT

Group: 4 people

Year: 2008

Thesis topic: A Generic Community Association Portal. Research on common processes across Homeowner's Associations and automating them. It was sort of an ERP system for Homeowners Associations that could be used by commercial buildings as well.

JIRA business model (SaaS-hosted or downloadable). Features included the filing of permits and requests, reserving amenities, simple billing for association dues, association announcement board with sms/email notifications and visitor management. We built the prototype in Java (JSP + Resin + MySQL).

Didn't receive high grades with it, since at that time as college students, we couldn't properly defend ourselves when a professor from the panel pointed out that our system could be replaced with someone wrangling Excel sheets in a Yahoo Group.

In the end we got a passing grade just for the high amount of domain research on problems encountered when operating a large Homeowner's Association.

Course: Preliminary Spacecraft Design (for BS in Aerospace Engineering)

Group: 8 (I was Project Manager)

Year: 2013

Thesis Topic: Prevention and mitigation of Kessler Syndrome effects in low earth orbit.

We were tasked with designing a "full stack" space mission complete with a constrained budget, launch vehicle, launch locations, and a mission time line from launch to end of mission.

We designed a "space debris removal as a service" satellite system that would deorbit debris from the Iridium 33 satellite collision. It would launch from Vandenburg's Space Launch Complex 4-East which would effectively inject the spacecraft into a polar orbit. Communications would be handled by McMurdo and Svalbard stations.

The craft would rendezvous with the debris, attach itself and deorbit. Initially we were going to use the atmosphere to burn up the debris but we did not have access to the materials that the Iridium satellite was made of so we were unsure if the debris Would completely disintegrate upon reentry so we decided to deorbit it into a graveyard orbit safely away from future spacelanes.

We got some flak from the defense panel stating our attachment methods wouldn't work so well in space but overall we received good reviews. I received an A for the project.

Thesis: "Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design in Fethiye and a Proposal of Crime GIS Database"

I collected crime data from multiple resources and analyzed it in 3 dimensional space (lat, long, time) in order to understand which areas crime took place most and frequently. Then I proposed physical urban implementations to decrease the crime rates.

I was alone and It was a 12 credits project, completed in 2 semesters.

Exploratory Study on the Design of Combined Aero-Thermo-Structural Experiments in High Speed Flows

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?106431717476248::NO:10:P10_ET...

Commercial Media Viewing Habits: Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10:P10_ACCESSION_NUM:bg...

...but your professor was wrong, OP. Wrangling spreadsheets means no permissions (anyone could make changes), no audit trail (and you would't know who made changes), and no enforcement of business rules.

Structural Topology Optimization using the Genetic Algorithm

http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/35410

Component technology in an embedded system

http://www.polberger.se/components/

Logistic differential equations with a focus on population growth.

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