NAIL is currently only accepting and handling master's thesis proposals from our partners. Other companies or institutions are of course free to contact NTNU supervisors directly to establish a project proposal with them.

Master's theses can be purely technical with implementation and experiments. They can address research challenges or applications of AI. We also welcome project proposals that study innovation aspects or methodological aspects of using AI.

If you have some ideas that you want to discuss, we incourage you to reach out sooner rather than later so that we can help you tune the project and find a supervisor.

To suggest a project, please download and use our template linked in the right sidebar. As described in the template, your project pitch must include:

• A brief introduction to the company or unit in which the work will be carried out, including the in-house contact person
• A high-level problem description, including the project-title, time frame, and (potential) NTNU supervisor
• Description of the data and how it will be made available
• Potential challenges that you foresee when working on the data or another part of the thesis. 

Once complete, reach out to the NAIL administration through email to submit the template. Please submit one project description for each of your suggested theses, unless they are so closely linked that they are best presented together. The deadline is posted in the right sidebar.

After submission, we will evaluate and give feedback on your proposal, and help you find a suitable NTNU supervisor.

If your project idea is approved, and we are able to allocate a suitable supervisor for it, the proposal will be made available to our students at NTNU in early April.

In April, NAIL is hosting a pitching and mingling event with students, called Master Safari. Here you will get the chance to meet with students and tell them more about the task. 

Students then choose their thesis topic in mid May. The master's theses can be done by individual students or in groups of two students.

Most students work on their project and thesis over one academic year, starting with the pre-project in fall. In the following spring they work on writing the thesis itself and usually deliver the thesis before summer.

This timeline is relevant for projects hosted at the Department of Computer Science (IDI). Other departments may have varying timelines and deadlines.

There is no guarantee that a student will pick up your thesis proposal, as there are hundreds of potential topics to choose from and only so many students and supervisors available. 

For this reason, we recommend having a long term perspective on the process. Should your thesis not be chosen the first time, we encourage you to continue working with the NTNU supervisor, parttake in our partner events with student involvement, and submit it again the following year.

Some factors that students value are:

• Having active and available supervisors with the partner collaborator
• Possibility of visiting or having a desk in the partner collaborator facilities
• Available and high quality data. Most students want to avoid data labelling or cleaning before starting
• Freedom to shape and influence the task as they go

We recommend that our partners assign at least one person who can follow up the student.

This person should be updated on the problem that the student is trying to solve, however it is not necessary that they have extensive experience in AI. The most important is to have extensive domain knowledge from the relevant sector, and ideally some understanding of computer science terms.

It is up to each partner how much time and effort you invest in following up the student. However, we believe that the more you make yourself available for the student, the better the end result will turn out.