Does your company have research projects for computer science students?

We are looking for innovative companies, in the Netherlands, with data-driven teams involved in security, AI or other research that are willing to provide a business problem to solve and an in-house supervisor.  In return the companies will get a small team (2-3 third year computer science students) that will apply state of the art methods to solve the problem.

Business track background

As computer science matures, many theoretical problems have become practical problems: many organizations have valuable data related to their business and are able to integrate new designs, software systems and workflows. This applies not only to “traditional” IT-companies, but also for logistical, facilities, retail companies or even the public sector. All of them are now able to extract unprecedented insights and value from their data. Accessing such data is an exciting opportunity for many students at VU, since it enables them to learn and collaborate in a business setting, and experience the practical aspects of deploying IT solutions first-hand. For participating companies, the VU Business Track is an equally valuable opportunity to apply fresh talent on their own business problems and get a preview of prospective candidates entering the job market. Building on the success from the 2024 business track, ICT Institute has been asked again by the Vrije Universiteit to support up to 8 groups of 2-3 students to work on real world thesis problems.

Last year, seven teams worked on projects involving the Trigger no-code platform, the Leefbarometer dataset, analysis of software repository / bug tracking data, forecasting of book sales data and analysis of tender documents. The students applied various methods to answer the research questions provided by companies. Example results include using prompt engineering and chat-GPT for code generation, or XGboost for book sales forecasts. Below is the architecture used for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) by Thanh Le in his thesis “NERRAG: Named Entity Recognition Retrieval Augmented Generation“. Thanh Le was awarded the Business Track Excellent Thesis award 2024 for making the best thesis in the business track (top 4%, ranking first in a group of more than 25 students).

Business track approach – student perspective

All students will make in a team on their sub-question, and deliver their  own thesis document. Theses are graded individually. The main differences with the classic individual thesis track are:

• Students will work on a real business problem at a real company, with regular feedback from a company supervisor
• The students will work in a group of up to four students, that all work on a unique subproblem for the same company
• Instead of receiving only individual supervision from the VU supervisors, the students will receive a combination of lectures, group-feedback and individual feedback
• The track contains several well-defined intermediate deliverables and presentations, as is common in business settings, that are designed to help students plan their effort towards a final thesis.

To repeat the success of the last year’s edition, we are looking for organizations that have stimulating data- and software-related problems to solve, and managers/team leads that are interested in supervising a group of students.

Timeline

To help both the companies and the students, the business track has a clear timeline with well-defined activities. Below is the monthly schedule. As you can see, companies will interact with the students from February 2025 until June 2025. In this short time frame, student teams must show weekly progress and deliver results incrementally. The VU lecturers (Sieuwert, Joost and Pavlo) will help the students manage this schedule. The company supervisors have more of a ‘product owner’ role: explain the intended result, provide access to the organisation and provide feedback.

Benefits for organizations

The VU Business Track of the Bachelor Project Computer Science provides organisations  with the opportunity to use the talents of our Computer Science Bachelor students to work on a problem the business partner is facing. The students will work on the problem specified by the business, for instance trying different methods or automating different steps of a process.

Students are expected to work three days a week on the Bachelor Project, so you can expect quite some new ideas, data insights or software prototypes to help you explore and solve your problem (but please do take in mind that the students will also need to have some time to create some work products for the university, like a research plan, final presentation and report). In addition, you will be providing a unique learning experience to our students.

Because the students have an international background and the research period is short, it is not a full internship. The company supervisor must be available weekly and the students will visit the company a few times, but the companies do not have to fully onboard students and do not have to provide a desk or laptop. It has also been decided not to provide financial compensation to students, since this is difficult to arrange for all students.

In exchange for the work of students on your business problem, we have the following expectations from the business partners that want to participate in the Business Track of the Bachelor Project Computer Science of the Vrije Universiteit:

• The organisation shall create a short problem statement and ideally also provide access to data or other resources that the question is about. This can be a limited or sanitised dataset.
• Each organisation makes one company supervisor available for 1-2 hours per week. They are the main point of contact for students. The company supervisor can meet all students in one joint meeting, making the best use of company time.
• The company supervisor connects students as needed to other people in the company, so that each student can also conduct individual interviews.

Suitable project topics

The company proposes a main topic or challenge. Each student in a group then chooses a unique, specific sub-question relevant for the main topic or challenge. The sub-questions can be related, e.g. create prototype for one task, analyse part of the data, or evaluate one modelling technique.

Suitable projects for the Business Track of the Bachelor Project Computer Science can include:

• Data Science projects (projects that relate to using business data to help solve business problems using analytics and machine learning/AI).
• Innovative Software Development projects (projects that relate to using innovative solutions to new problems that result in a prototype that demonstrates the new algorithm/solution, it should therefore not be regular software development projects that only have working software as their final goal).
• Evaluation of potential solutions, e.g. applying an existing library or API to a new problem.

The VU supervisor (Joost, Pavlo or Sieuwert) can help the company supervisors to create a written description of the problem to be solved. The description should be a 1-2 page document that contains:

• Description of the company and their challenges
• Short background and role of business supervisor.
• A business related Computer or Data Science problem. The problem description should make clear what the company will provide (e.g. data, current design, current algorithm) and what
• A deliverable the company expects (e.g. visualization of data, a machine learning model/algorithm or a prototype)
• Links to company website, existing whitepapers or already published resources that the company supervisor expects students to read.

How to apply

In the next few months, the team (Joost, Pavlo and Sieuwert) will invite companies based on matching expertise. The focus of Joost is on public sector and open data. The focus of Pavlo is on innovation around cyber security and the focus of Sieuwert is advances in data science and software engineering. If you have an interesting business problem to submit or you are interested in a company supervisor role, send a short mail to Sieuwert van Otterloo with a link to the company website, a short description of your role in the company and the project idea.

Img source: Aaron Burden via Unsplash