Education

Open theses, current areas, and teaching information for students interested in working with TECO and the Chair of Pervasive Computing Systems.

Who We Are

We are the Chair of Pervasive Computing Systems and the long-standing TECO research department at KIT. We are the ones who invented the web browser on the smartphone, created the first digital objects, and built the first European sensor network. We are an expert team with excellent international connections, happy to send good students abroad. We have excellent contacts in the industry, are located in the SAP Research Center, and have an interdisciplinary focus.

Who We Are Looking For

You are looking for an exceptional Bachelor's or Master's thesis, in a very inspiring environment, and want to collaborate with internationally recognized top scientists from research and industry. You are highly motivated and want to contribute your own ideas. You are very gifted practically or theoretically, or both. You are interested in helping build a new chair. You work independently but enjoy being part of a team. You are interested in working with the latest technology.

Thesis Topics

Find the right topic for your Bachelor's or Master's thesis. For writing, use the TECO thesis templates as ZIP downloads in German or English, or use the Overleaf templates in German or English.

Quantifying User-Level Domain Shift in Human Activity Recognition

BachelorMaster

HAR models often perform well on users represented during training but degrade substantially when applied to unseen users due to differences in individual movement patterns. However, it remains difficult to quantify how large this user-level domain shift is without relying on a trained model. This bachelor’s thesis investigates model-free statistical measures based on time- and frequency-domain sensor features, dimensionality reduction, and clustering/separability analysis. The goal is to develop an interpretable domain-shift metric that correlates with the performance drop of HAR models on unseen users and can help estimate generalization difficulty directly from the data.

Diffusion-Based Personalization for Human Activity Recognition

Master

HAR models often perform well on users represented during training but generalize poorly to unseen users due to differences in individual movement patterns. Collecting sufficient labeled data to retrain or personalize models for every new user is impractical. This master’s thesis investigates Diffusion Models (Flow Matching / Stochastic Interpolants) as a way to generate personalized sensor data from only limited user information. User prototypes will be used to condition and steer the generative process toward specific or previously unseen users. The resulting synthetic data will be used to improve cross-user generalization and enable few-shot personalization of HAR classifiers. Candidates should have strong deep learning foundations, Python and PyTorch skills, and an interest in generative modeling and domain adaptation.

Recognition and Classification of Allergy-Related Events from Wearable Sensor Data

BachelorMaster

Allergy-related reactions such as eye rubbing, palate rubbing, swallowing, and throat clearing occur repeatedly throughout the day but are rarely documented reliably. This thesis aims to develop a machine-learning pipeline that automatically recognizes such events in continuous multimodal wearable-sensor data and subsequently classifies them into distinct reaction types. The proposed approach consists of two stages: Event recognition: Detecting when a potentially relevant event occurs within a continuous sensor stream.Event classification: Determining which type of allergy-related reaction occurred.

Hardware Design and Prototyping of a Wearable Device for Personal Air Quality Monitoring

BachelorMaster

Airable is a custom-built smart hair pin or necklace accessory that integrates miniature environmental sensors to support personal air-quality monitoring and pollen-allergy research. The goal of this thesis is to design and evaluate the a basic functional prototype, combining sensing, wireless communication, power management, and a wearable form factor.

External Theses at Companies

Please note that for external theses, a project contact from the chair to the company must exist to ensure academic quality. Due to high demand, external theses are only supervised if the topic is issued by a staff member of the chair. Topics issued by the industry side are no longer supervised. As a rule, the work requires the company supervisor to be present at meetings at TECO. Please ask your contact person at the company first. Please consider that it is statistically likely that the creation of the thesis will be driven less by a scientific question and more by the company's economic interests. However, your grade will be based solely on the scientific content of your work.

Responsibilities

Please note that you are responsible for the correct execution of your thesis. If you are in your 7th or even 8th Master's semester, you will need an extension. You must arrange for this yourself. Your thesis should be registered in a timely manner. You must communicate to your supervisor when you plan to start the work. Registration cannot be done just before submission. Your thesis submission must be complete. You are responsible for this, not your supervisor. Only what has been submitted can be included in the evaluation of the thesis.

Topic Areas

If there are no open thesis topics that match your interests, or if you have a topic of your own in mind, you are welcome to submit an unsolicited application. Please include a short paragraph explaining your motivation, your CV, your study program (Bachelor/Master), current semester and field of study, a transcript of records with courses and grades, your programming experience, and any areas of interest relevant to the topic.

Affective Computing for Mental Health and Accessibility

HCI & Sensory Tech

Contact: Jueun Lee

Innovative iOS / iPadOS apps that are related with any topic mentioned here

HCI & Sensory Tech

Contact: Philipp Lepold

Interaction Design and User Studies

HCI & Sensory Tech

Contact: Jueun Lee, Valeria Zitz

Wearables

HCI & Sensory Tech

Contact: Philipp Lepold, Valeria Zitz