You must choose your supervisor among a researcher (Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, Postdoc, PhD Fellow, Research Assistant) in the Computer Science department. There can be exceptions that must be approved by your Head of Study Programme.
It is your right as a student to get a supervisor for both the Research Project and the MSc. thesis. However, supervisors are researchers, expert in certain areas. Hence, it is important that you choose a topic for which we actually have people who could supervise you: if there is no expert in our department, we cannot guarantee that you will find a supervisor. Therefore, it is extremely important that you think about the two things (topic and supervisor) at the same time.
Obviously, since your topic is most likely associated to your specialization, you will have to look for a supervisor among the teachers and the research group of such specialization.
Research Group
It is almost never the case that there is only one expert for the area you are interested in. All Advanced courses are taught by more than one person and specializations are associated to a research group. So, please visit the research group page of the person you have in mind, and consider contacting other researchers too.
Check out these links:
How to contact researchers
Many supervisors get requests from multiple students, and will not be able to accept them all. In order to make the process fast and efficient, we recommend that you use the following protocol for contacting people in the CS department:
Contact people using email
Make sure you do not write very long emails: show you know what their research expertise is, ask for an appointment, do not spam!
If the previous point fails (wait 3 working days), try to go to their office or ask during a class.
E-mail soliciting a supervisor:
From: Patrick Bahr (paba@itu.dk)
To: Marco Carbone (maca@itu.dk)
Subj: Research project and Thesis supervisor
Dear Marco,
I’m looking for a supervisor.
I’m interested in the intersection of distributed systems and it-security, particularly the use of cryptographic primitives for solving consensus problems. I particularly enjoyed your MODIS course and SECURITY II, and would like to do more work along these lines.
Could we meet and discuss?
Thanks,
Patrick
The above is an example of a good mail soliciting a supervisor. The student knows what he/she finds interesting, but does not have a particular idea in mind.
If you do have a particular idea in mind, add at most one paragraph (4 lines) explaining or hinting at the idea. Very likely, your supervisor will be interested in parts of your idea but not necessarily in its entirety, so you have to be ready to negotiate a topic that suits the both of you.