Theses and Projects

An introduction to the Computer Networks group

See a poster for a general overview, an anchor to our research activities, a list of social computing related or networking-related publications, and the annual report(s) for our recent activities.

Joint PhD Program with University of Sydney

From September 2024 on there will be the possibility to start a joint PhD with the University of Sydney (Australia). PhD students will stay in both Göttingen and Sydney for at least one year and can achieve two PhD degrees. For more information, please contact Prof. Xiaoming Fu [fu@cs.uni-goettingen.de].

In November/December 2023, Fabian visited research groups in Melbourne and Sydney. Impressions of his visit can be seen here: pdf

Open Theses and Student Project Topics

The Computer Networks Group is always looking for motivated students to work on various topics. If you are interested in any of the projects below, or if you have other ideas and are willing to work with us, please don't hesitate to contact us.

• (B) Bachelor thesis
• (M) Master thesis
• (P) Student project

* New! Tree Growth Detection using Satellite Images and Computer Vision Methods (B/M/P)

A tree planting project in Madagascar was initiated several years ago. The outcomes of this project shall now be evaluated by analyzing satellite images of the study area with Computer Vision methods. In a first step, very high resolution (VHR) satellite images from 2023 with a resolution of 0.5m will be used to identify trees with object detection / semantic segmentation. In the next step a lower resolution (5m) satellite image time series starting in 2015 will be used for change detection to identify, in which locations the project was (un)successful.

Please contact Fabian Wölk [fabian.woelk@cs.uni-goettingen.de]

* New! Image-to-Image Translation of Different Nightlight Image Types (B/M/P)

Nightlight intensities have been proven to be a good indicator for socio-economic status. However, for long-term temporal analyses their use can be challenging, as different satellites for sensing nightlight intensities operated at different times (DMSP OLS 1992-2014 and VIIRS 2012-2023). Both types differ not only in resolution, but there is also a big discrepancy in the optical appearance and value ranges. To obtain consistent nightlight images for temporal analysis, Image-to-Image Translation methods shall be used in this project/thesis for the conversion between both types. Finally the performance of the translated and original nightlight images for a regression on socio-economic indicators shall be evaluated.

Please contact Fabian Wölk [fabian.woelk@cs.uni-goettingen.de]

[Occupied] Satellite Image Indices and Machine Learning for Socio-economic Estimation (B/M/P)

There are several indices, which can be derived from satellite images. For example the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) indicates the presence and condition of vegetation, while the Normalized Difference Built-up Index (NDBI) indicates the presence of built-up areas such as buildings or roads. The distributions of these and other indices may have different explanatory power to estimate the socio-economic status of locations. Therefore in this project/thesis the regression performance of machine learning models - using statistics of these indices as features - to estimate socio-economic indicators shall be evaluated for the individual and also combined indices. Optionally, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) can be applied additionally, which take the derived index images as input.

Please contact Fabian Wölk [fabian.woelk@cs.uni-goettingen.de]

* New! 3D natural hazard simulator

The aim of the project is to simulate representative natural hazards for hazard response, such as flooding and forest fire. A natural hazard response simulator will be implemented for both visualization and performance validation. For example, we can visualize the flooding of 2021 in Germany, and then validate the performance of drone deployment in hazard sensing and emergency communication. Here, we introduce some related works in virtual 3D scene which may help you to understand this project, e.g., Agents Toolkit (ML-Agents) [1], DisasterSim [2] and Airsim [3].

[1] Unity Technologies.Unity ML-Agents Toolkit. Jan 26, 2021.URL:https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/ml-agents. (accessed: 21.11.2021) [2] Wang, H., Liu, C. H., Dai, Z., Tang, J., & Wang, G. (2021, August). Energy-efficient 3D vehicular crowdsourcing for disaster response by distributed deep reinforcement learning. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (pp. 3679-3687). [3] S. Shah, D. Dey, C. Lovett, and A. Kapoor. “Airsim: High-fidelity visual and physical simulation forautonomous vehicles”. In:Field and Service Robotics. Springer. 2018, pp. 621–635.

Please contact Prof. Xiaoming Fu [fu@cs.uni-goettingen.de](B/M/P)

* New! UAV trajectory planning for disaster monitoring

Satellite images will be used for segments hazard regions and level of danger; next, combining image/video analytics/geo-information to find out interest of points (e.g., buildings); last, planning multiple UAVs' trajectory for monitoring detail informations.

Please contact Dr. Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de], Weijun Wang [weijun.wang@informatik.uni-goettingen.de] (B/M/P)\\

* New! OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and Annotation Transfer

The aim of the project is to develop a tool/software that can convert a printed paper with annotations and text into electronic versions with text highlighting and annotations. The successful candidate will be responsible for developing this tool/software that can perform the following tasks:

1. Text Alignment: Develop algorithms to align the text in the electronic version with the original printed paper.

2. Annotation Recognition: Develop software that can recognize annotation areas in the printed paper and transfer them to the electronic version.

3. Transfer Annotations: Transfer annotations and highlighting from the paper-based article to the electronic version.

[1] https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/opencv-perspective-transformation-9edffefb2143

[2] https://developer.adobe.com/analytics-apis/docs/2.0/guides/endpoints/annotations/

[3] https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/apis/pdf-services/

[4] https://www.cameralyze.co/blog/how-can-i-detect-lines-in-images-or-pdfs

Please contact Dr. Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de]] (B/M/P)

[Occupied] Privacy-preserved Video Analytics

This project/thesis topic focuses on the protection of privacy in videos analytics.

The project involves three key tasks:

1) Implementation of a system utilizing YOLO and CycleGANs/DataGen for video analysis and processing. Code for this is already available for use.

2) Development of a privacy protection mechanism by adjusting the level of blur applied to the video, taking into account a trade-off between inference accuracy (e.g. detection by YOLO) and the level of privacy protection.

3) Optimization of the blur level for Pan-tilt-zoom cameras, to ensure that the system is effective at capturing key visual information while still preserving privacy.

Please contact Dr. Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de] (B/M/P)

[1] Pecam: privacy-enhanced video streaming and analytics via securely-reversible transformation [1].

* New! AI for networking adaption

In this project/theses topic, you will explore how to make AI meets networking requirements (e.g., fluctuating network states). You will (1) deploy and test Genet[1]; (2)extend the Genet environment to multi-client environment (e.g., ABR); (3) deploy multi-agent algorithms on Genet and valid the performance.

[1] Genet: Automatic Curriculum Generation for Learning Adaptation in Networking [2]

Please contact Dr. Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de]] (B/M/P)

* [Occupied] Video analytics with deep reinforcement learning

The proliferation of video analytics is facilitated by the advances of deep learning and the low prices of high-resolution network-connected cameras. However, the accuracy improvement from deep learning is at the high computational cost. Although the state-of-the-art smart cameras can support deep learning method, the deployed surveillance and traffic camera paint a much bleaker resource picture. For example, DNNCam that ships with a high-end embedded NVIDIA TX2 GPU costs more than $2000 while the price of deployed traffic cameras today ranges $40-$200; these cameras typically loaded with a single-core CPU only provide very scarce compute resource. Because of this huge gap, typical video analytics applications, e.g., traffic cameras stream live video to remote server for further analysis. As a result, a natural question occurs: which video streaming configuration also server decoding configuration should we select to guarantee high analysis accuracy as well as not incur network congestion? To answer this question, we attempt to explore the performance of deep reinforcement learning under this scenario.

Please contact Dr. Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de], Weijun Wang [weijun.wang@informatik.uni-goettingen.de] (B/M/P)

* [Occupied] AI for Games

Can Artificial intelligence (AI) beat humans at games? AI has played an increasingly prominent and productive role in the gaming world. Implemented in many different ways, AI is used to improve game behaviors and environments. In this project, we will design AI algorithms (i.e., multi-agent reinforcement learning) for games (e.g., StarCraft: https://github.com/oxwhirl/smac). The main challenge here is to coordinate agents in achieving joint goals (i.e., win), such as by efficient communication.

[1]https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03298-6

Please contact Dr. Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de] (B/M/P)

* New! Socioecomonic analysis based on spatiotemporal and linguistic analysis on microblogging data

Identifying the socioeconomic status (SES) of users in social media like Twitter or Weibo is useful e.g., for digitized advertisements and social policies. This study aims to collect profiles of Twitter users on selected topics such as culture or foreign language learning, extract the temporal, spatial and linguistic features, and compare different classification algorithms (e.g., decision tree, random forest, na\"{i}ve Bayes, deep learning, and Gaussian processes classifier) to predict the socioeconomic status.

[1] Ren Y, Xia T, Li Y, Chen X. Predicting socio-economic levels of urban regions via offline and online indicators. PLoS One. 2019;14(7):e0219058. Published 2019 Jul 10. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0219058 [2] Pappalardo L, Pedreschi D, Smoreda Z, Giannotti F. Using Big Data to study the link between human mobility and socio-economic development. In: IEEE International Conference on Big Data 2015. doi:10.1109/BigData.2015.7363835 [3] Vasileios Lampos, Nikolaos Aletras, Jens K. Geyti, Bin Zou and Ingemar J. Cox (2016). Inferring the Socioeconomic Status of Social Media Users based on Behaviour and Language. Proceedings of the 38th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR '16), pp. 689-695. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-30671-1_54

Please contact Prof. Xiaoming Fu [fu@cs.uni-goettingen.de](B/M/P)

New video/image encoding for DNN applications

• New! Video/image encoding is important for image/video storage/delivery on Internet. It reduces file size by eliminating spatial-temporal redundancy. Along with the development of Deep Neural Network in the computer vision(CV) community, video/image encoding for DNN applications is becoming more and more crucial. This project attempts to compare the difference between video/image encoding for QoE and DNN applications; and explore the design space in the video/image encoding for DNN applications. We expect you have Digital Image Process and Computer Vision background, as well as programming skills like Python and C/C++.

Please contact Weijun Wang [weijun.wang@informatik.uni-goettingen.de] (B/M/P)

Super resolution technique for efficient video delivery

• New! Super-resolution (SR) is one of the fundamental tasks in Computer vision. Video delivery on Internet or in WAN is important for various applications, eg., video analytics and video viewing. This project attempts to explore the potential of SR for video delivery. We expect you have Data Science and Computer Vision background, as well as programming skills like Python.

Please contact Weijun Wang [weijun.wang@informatik.uni-goettingen.de] (B/M/P)

[closed] Assessing city livability with big data

• City livability is related to a number of factors, such as quality of life, job satisfaction, environment (green space, CO2/PM2.5, schooling/health support etc), policy, commuting time, entertainment. We utilize different data sources to understand their relation to the city livability, and analyze the coherent features which offer an evaluation framework for a city's attractiveness and livability for different types of citizens. We expect you have some statistics and machine learning background, as well as programming skills like Python.

Please contact Prof. Xiaoming Fu (B/M/P).

Socioeconomic analysis on commuters

• New! Understanding the commuter behaviour and the factors that lead to commuting are more important today than ever before. With steadily increasing commuter numbers, the commuter traffic can be a major bottleneck for many cities. The increasing awareness of a good work-life balance leads to more people wanting shorter commuting distances. The commuter behaviour consequently plays an increasingly important role in city and transport planning and policy making. This topic aims to infer knowledge from commuter data, analyzing the influence of GDP, housing prices, family situation, income and job market on the decision to commute. We expect you have some statistics and machine learning background, as well as programming skills like Python.

Please contact Prof. Xiaoming Fu (B/M/P)

Socioeconomic Status and Internet Language Usage

• New! Numerous people write social media posts and exchange messages with colleagues, friends, acquaintances or even strangers on different platforms. We would like to understand how the underlying social class membership (socioeconomic status) affects Internet users' language use, by investigating the sociolinguistic features in users' posts/messages across a multitude of datasets and their relationship to their socioeconomic status. We expect you have some statistics and textual analysis/natural language processing background, as well as programming skills like Python.

Please contact Prof. Xiaoming Fu (B/M/P)

[closed] Multimedia Resource Allocation for QoE Improvement by Deep Learning

• Deep learning has been widely used in various real-time applications and systems. Dynamic resource allocation for multimedia (e.g. Video) to improve QoE is an interesting topic. We need three students for this topic. We expect you have a background in deep learning and computer network, as well as programming skills like Python and Go.

(1) one to realize and improve the system for video transmission and network configuration according to resource allocation policy;

• You will use QUIC [3] protocol (Go language) to implement network allocation and place the server part on AWS/other clouds.

(2) one to implement the deep learning algorithm to design the controller for dynamic resource allocations.

(3) one student for the QoE model using deep learning.

Please contact Dr.Tingting Yuan [tingting.yuan@cs.uni-goettingen.de ] and Weijun Wang [weijun.wang@informatik.uni-goettingen.de](B/M/P)

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Completed Topics

Topic	Topic advisor	Initial readings	Description	Student
Bio-Data analysis (Student project)	Mayutan Arumaithurai			Assigned to Lindrit
Sentiment Analysis (Student project)	Hong Huang			Assigned to Beatrice Kateule
Analysis of Business Transitions: A Case Study of Yelp (Bachelor Thesis)	Hong Huang			Assigned to Marcus Thomas Khalil
Understanding Group Patterns in Q&A Services (Bachelor Thesis)	Hong Huang			Assigned to Jonas Koopmann
COPSS-lite : Lightweight ICN Based Pub/Sub for IoT Environments (Master Thesis)	Sripriya			Assigned to Haitao Wang
A ICN Gateway for IoT (Bachelor Thesis)	Sripriya			Assigned to Janosch Ruff
Build a personalized context-aware recommender system for customers according to their own interest.				Completed by Haile Misgna
Emotion Patterns Analysis in OSNs (Bachelor thesis Project)	Hong Huang,Xu Chen		We aim to study the emotion patterns in the Twitter service and predict the future emotion status of users.	Completed by Stefan Peters
Implementation of a pub/sub system (Student project)	Jiachen Chen Mayutan Arumaithurai		The aim of the work is to show how application layer intelligence cupled with network layer pub/sub can be beneficial to both users as well as network operators	Completed by Sripriya
Large Scale Distributed Natural Language Document Generation System (Student project at IBM)	Mayutan Arumaithurai		The work was done at IBM	Completed by Eeran Maiti
Investigate real time streaming tools for large scale data processing (Student project)	Mayutan Arumaithurai		The aim of the work is to compare real time streaming tools.	Completed by Ram
Software-Defined Networking and Network Operating System (Student project)	Mayutan Arumaithurai		SDN based ntwork operating system	Completed by Rasha
GEMSTONE goes Mobile (BSc Thesis/Student Project)	David Koll		Portation of a Decentralized Online Social Network to the Android Platform	Completed by Fabien Mathey and improved by Eeran Maiti
Transitioning of Social Graphs between Multiple Online Social Networks (BSc Thesis)	David Koll		Portation of friendship graphs between different Online Social Networks	Completed by Kai-Stephan Jacobsen
Prevention and Mitigation of (D)DoS Attacks in Enterprise Environments (BSc Thesis)	David Koll		An analysis of enterprise infrastructures and their vulnerarbility towards attacks from the outside.	Completed by David Kelterer
Sybils in Disguise: An Attacker View on OSN-based Sybil Defenses (Student Project and MSc Thesis)	David Koll		An analysis of fake detection approaches in social networks.	Completed by Martin Schwarzmaier
Design and Implementation of a distributed OSN on Home Gateways (Student project and Master's Thesis)	David Koll			Completed by Dieter Lechler

QUIC or Multipath QUIC Design

• New! Implement algorithms for improving QUIC or Multipath QUIC performance. (B/M/P, at least familiar with one programming language (eg. C++, go or Python).) Please contact Yali Yuan (Finished)

Segment Routing based SDN

• NEW! Winter 2018/2019 There are many topics opened for Master and Bachelor theses and projects. Please contact Osamah Barakat

Software Defined Networks (SDN)

• New! Implementing more Gavel application by exploiting Graph algorithms. (B/M/P) Osamah Barakat details

• New! Including a Graph Database engine into an SDN Controller. (B/M/P) Osamah Barakat details

• New! A graph database tuning. (B/M/P) Osamah Barakat details

Data Analysis with Bio data

• NEW! 2019 ' if you are interested in topics in this area please get in contact with Mayutan Arumaithurai

Data Crawling and analysis

• Large scale distributed Data crawling and analysis of a popular web service (B/M/P)

• New! Data crawling and analysis of Twitter (P) (Tao Zhao)

Massive Data Mining and Recommender System

• Data Mining of the Web : User Behavior Analysis (B/M/P) Hong Huang

• Building the Genealogy for Researchers (B/M/P)Hong Huang

• Recommender System Design (B/M/P)Hong Huang

• if you are interested in other topics in this area please get in contact with Hong Huang

Social Networking(finished)

• New! Goettingen Assistant: Android App Development (completed) (P) (Shichang Ding)
• Topic prediction in online social networks (B/M/P)(Hong Huang)
• Mining emotion patterns in online social networks (B/M/P)(Hong Huang)
• Mining human mobility pattern from intra-city traffic data (B/M/P) (Shichang Ding)

• For a full list of older topics please go here.