Expectations and Requirements
The ASE project offers a unique and custom made research opportunity to gain lots of experience with systems engineering, software development and group work experience. You are given great freedom and responsibility in how you set up your project and we therefore seek motivated and truly interested participants. Make sure to review all requirements on this page to see if ASE is a good match for you.
Academic results
Per faculty of Science regulations, you can only apply for this project if you passed all your Bachelor courses. Because ASE overlaps with the Philosophy and Ethics course in P5, we obviously do not expect you to have passed it.
Prior knowledge
The project is programming-heavy and requires solid Linux and networking knowledge. There is no time to learn (or catch up with) the fundamentals during the project. We therefore have a strong preference for students who:
- Passed the VU CS Deep Programming minor, OR
- Obtained comparable, programming-related education at a different university, OR
- Has provable experience with Linux and networking (for example by showing open-source projects or extra-curricular courses)
The provided software framework is written largely in Go (Golang). Prior experience in Golang is a plus, but not required. To get started quickly, we provide official ASE libraries and tutorials for C, Python, Go and Rust but you can write your software in any language you like.
Time commitment
This project is a tough, but rewarding experience. We expect your fulltime commitment (40h/week) to the project during the period of April - June, so it is highly advised not to have other significant time commitments (including jobs) outside of this project. We will take your time constraints into consideration during the review of your application to ensure you and your teammates are equally committed.
We have a responsibility towards every student to make sure that they are teamed up with equally motivated students, and not being taken advantage of by free riders. As such, hiding or lying about any other time commitments you may have during the project period is considered fraud and will have serious consequences.
We of course understand that you need to (financially) sustain yourself and some commitments might be out of your control. If you think that your time constraints might hinder your commitment towards ASE, please let us know so that we can find a fitting solution.
Meetings
During the project, all group members must be present at all meetings unless otherwise stated.
- Once every two weeks: In person only meeting with (a part of) the core team to discuss your progress.
- Once every three weeks: online or in person meeting with your domain expert to ask domain-specific research questions. Be ready to meet in person if it is the preference of the domain expert.
Unless there are exceptional circumstances at play, all meetings will be held in-person. We do not offer online meetings as an alternative and failing to show up in person will impact your final grade. Please consider this before you apply.
Presentations
There are three mandatory presentations throughout the project in total.
- Towards the beginning: present your research question and domain (group-based, ungraded, ~7 min)
- 6 weeks in: present your progress so far and individual contributions (individual, ungraded, ~5 min)
- Final Thesis Presentation: present your research and demo your work (group-based, graded, 15 min)
All presentations are held in-person and are aimed at improving soft-skills. We value practicing presentations since we believe presenting / public speaking is not given enough attention. We will provide you with plenty of feedback for your first two (ungraded) presentations and prepare you for your final graded presentation.
Technical requirements
It goes without saying that we expect all students to have Linux installed. The provided Rover runs on ARM64 Ubuntu, but there are no architecture requirements for your device.