Thesis topic ideas

We are always looking for bright minds who want to work with us. If you are interested in what you see (or are inspired by the outlines), get in touch, we are happy to supervise you. You may also consider having a look at our open positions…

Finn Müller-Hansen
26 Oct 2023 Thesis Proposal
CDR on Twitter: links to external sources and/or qualitative analysis

Research questions

  • What links and sources do users share on Twitter about CDR?
  • What kinds of contents are shared?

Useful skills

python scripting for web crawling and data analysis, NLP
Finn Müller-Hansen
26 Oct 2023 Thesis Proposal
Technology scale up: comparing different growth measures for emerging technologies

Research questions: Which aspects of technology scale up do different measures highlight? Which aspects of growth trajectories do they focus on? On which indicators are they applicable? How well are they applicable to incomplete and noisy data? Useful skills: mathematical modeling, data analysis (curve fitting) Useful prior knowledge: innovation, development, scaling and diffusion of emerging technologies Related literature: Nemet et al. (forthcoming), Wilson papers, Cherp et al. Contact: Finn
Tim Repke
26 Oct 2023 Thesis Proposal
Tracking CDR deployments

Starting with a list of CDR companies (e.g. cdr.fyi, cdratlas, https://carbonplan.org/…) and CDR news (e.g. mailing list), find news articles, grey literature, tweets, … mentioning those companies. Can we extract information such as actual sequestration, projected scale, and investments? Construct a database/knowledge graph of bits of information and sources.

Tim Repke
26 Oct 2023 Thesis Proposal
Visual metaphors for CDR and/or climate change

What images do different media outlets choose for their content on climate change or different CDR methods? Looking at cover images in news platforms or attachments in Tweets (or other social media), run object detection on those and maybe some “mood” measures to compare common themes. Are there common visual metaphors (e.g. natural solutions always with rainforest, other things with smoke stacks or clouds)? Useful skills: basic programming to retrieve and manage data and apply image classification Contact: Tim
Max Callaghan
26 Sep 2023 Thesis Proposal
When and how can ChatGPT help us to save hand labeling efforts

We spend a lot of time and money on students to annotate text data. Some of them are used to train ML text classification models. Can ChatGPT be used to save some of the resources?