I supervise BSc and MSc thesis projects, thesis preparation projects, and projects outside course scope (POCS, on both BSc and MSc levels) on HCI and VR. Please read and do the below to find out whether I or someone else in our research group or at DIKU is the most matching supervisor for your research interests, and to have that potential supervisor to agree to meet with you. The below advice can go to all DIKU students (on BSc, MSc, POCS, and thesis preparation projects) in general, although I use my particular research topics as examples. As an exception, Projects in Practice may have different aims, but a similar process for identifying a matching supervisor likely applies.
First, try to identify a research field you are interested in. Think back on the courses you have taken. Which topics you were interested in, and which you were good at? All the project work (including BSc, MSc, POCS) is independent and research-oriented.
Independency
Unlike in courses where there are TAs to help you in learning practical skills (e.g., to program in a particular language), you will not receive any of such guidance when doing a project. You need to select and frame the topic that matches your skills and that you can therefore independently carry out.
Research
All the BSc, MSc, and POCS projects are research-oriented. Or rather, they are research. It is natural to think a “product” like a game, an application, a classification or an interpretation of data as the topic and a goal of a project; something that solves a problem you, a company, or the public may have. However, contributing free labor with computer science skills (e.g., programming graphics for a game, developing an application for healthcare, or doing journalism with data) is not computer science research. The goal of research and of your project is to build scientific knowledge. In my field, human–computer interaction, that can be about theory, methodology, or design of user interfaces and interaction techniques; you can read below more about what I think of HCI research.
After you have a sense of the topic at the level of research field and that matches your skills from the courses you have taken, you can identify the corresponding section at DIKU. You can find the list of sections here on DIKU's website under the research tab. Their names can reveal the research field, or you can search in which section the professors of the courses you liked and were good at are based in.
Finding the top matches
Professors and postdocs can act formally as supervisors in all the projects; PhD students can co-supervise with them. Often, professors have much more course teaching and other students to supervise, and therefore you are more likely to catch a postdoc or a PhD student as a supervisor.
To find them, look at a section’s web page. For example, I would direct you to look at the HCC website. You can also check if you can find subpages for particular research topics under the sections. For me and quite a few others it would this website for XR research. Unfortunately, our webpages are not well updated nor organised, and therefore you often need to do a people-based approach as per the next point.
Read the profiles of the people (you can find a list of them on the section’s website, subpages, or on course pages). One way to start is to read their KU profile pages and their research interests in those by clicking their name. These might be brief or non-existent, and therefore a better way is to check out their Google Scholar profile and skim their most recent publications. You can do this by going to Google Scholar searching with their name, and sorting the publications by year to find their most recent research directions. A third way is to try to find their personal web pages; some have such and some don’t. And some even have a list of potential topics on their webpage, but you still need to do the thinking work yourself on why you are interested in the project and how you can independently carry it out.
Once you have identified the people that match your interests, try to identify keywords that could specify the topic further. You can do this by skimming the biographies of the potential supervisors you found, their research interests (on their personal websites and KU profiles), and by skimming some of their recent publications (via Google Scholar). For example, if some of their specific paper sparks your interest, try to think if and which technology, methodology, concept, or theory it was that did so. For HCI, you can learn below more about these specific areas of interest and try to develop your own.
HCI research
There are different types of research contributions in HCI, that this article by Jacob O. Wobbrock and Julie Kientz exemplifies well. You can try to identify which of your interests and skills match these types. Often, projects and research combines many different types, so you don’t need to categorise your project plan based on these; rather, they help by providing you terms and concepts, and possibly giving ideas for research.
This article by Niels van Berkel and Kasper Hornbæk describes with specific examples on what matters to HCI as a science; the different implications our research can have for building knowledge. This may help you to better formulate research problems (vs. practical problems, that are not addressed in our projects, like I mentioned above).
Now you should have a ranked list of potential supervisors and a few specific topics and keywords that describes your interests and matches your skills. These will help tremendously to convince a supervisor to have a meeting with you; we cannot use an hour or even a half for everyone expressing their interest in our research area. Therefore, the specific topics need to come clearly through in an email before we agree on a meeting, I suggest to write in an email the topics of your interests as specifically as you can (e.g., by using those keywords and papers that matched your interests) and expressing your skills. When you ask a meeting with these, the supervisor is likely either to agree on one, or can direct you to a better-matching colleague. With just an interest in “HCI” or “VR” this is impossible to do (we are many with diverse specific interests across each research field), and you risk of not receiving any response to your email.
In your invitation to a potential supervisor to meet for a project, you should also specify what kind of a project format you are looking forward to do. It is your job to decide and find out that (as supervisors, we don't care about whether you do a 7.5 or 15 ECTS POCS, or a BSc in Blok1-2 or 3-4, and hence you should not ask us about those, but express to us what you would like to do). You should also find out the deadlines and the information you need to fill out the forms for contracts and drafting a project plan. You can find that information, or references to that information here, and the rest you can ask from Study Services (uddannelse email). You should inform the potential supervisor about these timelines and formalities, and you can use your notes for the topic you collected above to draft a project plan together with the required and recommended information and format on the above website.
In addition to emailing to the potential supervisors, you can meet some of them and hear from them about others in their sections at BSc and MSc events. For example, we have MSc course presentations (at least for Blok 3&4 that Yongluan organises in November), MSc welcome day and “Meet the professors” there (early September for 1st year MScs that Salma and the Study Services organise), and BSc information event 2 times a year (usually end of June and beginning of January organised by Pawel). In addition, there are smaller section-based events like the Open house at HCC. In some of these, you will have an access to slides that express the topics the professors research and supervise students in. However, I think it is hard for us to keep the topics we offer updated on the slides and other material (our research progresses fast, and many students might be interested in the same topic or made the project already). And it is hard to capture the breadth of the professors and topics when only 1-2 are representing >15 professors and postdocs in an event (an exception is e.g., the open house where the entire section aims to be present). Similarly, you can of course meet the professors at the courses you take, but those may not give you a sense of the breadth nor the depth of their research topics, and you meet less postdocs in those. Therefore, these are a good starting point, but you usually need to go through the above process of investigating yourself what are your interests and who matches those.
I hope this helps you to identify the best-matching supervisor for your projects and convince one to meet with you. I have based some of the above on my colleague Dan Ashbrook's website; he has excellent and further tips on how to catch supervisors and what are projects about (and unlike many, including me, he actually has some project topics listed as well!).