My Master Thesis in PoliMI

Last month I completed my Master Thesis in Politecnico di Milano, and I will graduate in Computer Science and Engineering this month. The thesis has occupied most of my time in the last few months, and it was a great satisfaction for me to see the results of this work.

In Politecnico di Milano and in other universities there is also the chance of doing a short thesis, and this will certainly save you many hours of work and a lot of stress.

However, my suggestion is to do NOT do it.

I’ve had several interviews in the last few weeks, and, since I do not have any work experience, my Thesis was the main topic discussed and the greatest source of interest by the companies I have been in contact with. A short and less structured Thesis, such as a Portfolio, it would have denied me a big chance to make a positive impression.

At the same time, it is relevant to choose a topic that is really found interesting, otherwise the stress and work load will become unmanageable.

Let’s move to the content of my thesis.

Following several Master courses, I have been fascinated by how the most recent advances in AI technology could have a huge impact on large amount of business and daily activities, being at the same time able to improve the quality of life in several manners. This is why I have done my Thesis in the context of Illegal Landfills Detection, in the hope that my work can make a positive contribution to the environment. The experience in studying and using several Computer Vision techniques such as Weakly Supervised Object Detection and Self-Supervised Learning was really helfpul to improve myself as a professional.

I also had the chance to the Thesis with a fellow student, this was really interesting because we had the chance to support and improve each other, if there is the chance my suggestion is to do the same.

The last relevant point is the choice of the Thesis Supervisor. It is crucial to have an supervisor available and willing to help, otherwise it is difficult to overcome the obstacles encountered during work. In my case, Professor. Piero Fraternali was a great choice, alongside his research group he led our work and he demonstrated that our work can touch on current and most important issues such as the environmental one, to which I am very attached, and that the research in this field can contribute to the development of solutions for problems that now more than ever require a rapid response.

Thanks to his experience, we also had the chance to publish a Survey related to our Thesis work in MDPI - Remote Sensing, and I am very satisfied with this result.

I think I’ve touched on all the relevant points of my thesis, good luck with yours!