[metrics-team] M.Sc projects at Edinburgh

[William Waites]

Hi all, I visited the IRC channel for some of the meeting earlier
today. I am a researcher at the School of Informatics -- though my
background is network engineering and my interest in things like Tor
comes from there, my actual area of research is completely
unrelated. However it occured to me that we have some 300 or so taught
M.Sc students who will be looking for projects across various computer
science subdisciplines. It might be nice to have some of those work on
things together with the Tor project.

One such proposal that I made for making improvements to Ooni can be
seen here:

    http://j6vwvo5cbgkdwfoo.onion/file/URI:CHK:hlb455txf3koftnq3qhvshkike:4fzxfggr5c5afluqw5etuvptdwqzl3fww2lwqbsqjo2ohqjgldha:3:10:129920/@@named=P028.pdf

(sorry, the entire project list is internal to the school, and yes
that is tahoe-lafs behind a hidden service.)

It's not necessarily the best exemplar of such a proposal, but the
basic idea is that it should be a relatively small piece of
self-contained interesting work. Self contained because of the
academic requirement being that the student demonstrate that it is
their own work. Small because this is for the project phase of an M.Sc
degree which means, roughly, that from February the student would do
background research and write a specific plan for what they will do,
and from March/April until August they would actually do it and write
it up -- so a fairly short timeframe. It should be interesting enough
that there are non-obvious aspects to the work.

It would be great to have more ideas that students could work on to
help the Tor project and wider ecosystem. I'm sure there is plenty of
material! As far as supervision arrangements go that will need to be
worked out -- having someone from Informatics and someone from
elsewhere is perfectly feasible. Depending on the level of interest I
can do some but probably not all, but for interesting ideas there are
other colleagues in the school who can help.

The deadline is soon! The 15th of January. Any specific ideas please
let me know as soon as possible.

Cheers,
-w

--
William Waites <wwaites at tardis.ed.ac.uk>  |  School of Informatics
   https://tardis.ed.ac.uk/~wwaites/      | University of Edinburgh
         https://hubs.net.uk/             |      HUBS AS60241

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