Navigation auf uzh.ch
Navigation auf uzh.ch
Students who produce outstanding scholarly work are nominated for a semester award. In this series, we look at a few examples to show what makes an excellent thesis, how it can benefit teaching, what motivates students to produce outstanding work, and how they are supported and guided by teaching staff.
Let’s go back to the fall of 2022: a market is taking place at the Department of Informatics. It’s a special kind of market because this is where instructors are presenting potential topics for their students’ Master’s projects. Informatics Master’s projects are aimed at specific applications and are generally completed by a team of two to five students within one year. “In software development, everything is based on teamwork. There’s empirical evidence showing that projects are more likely to fail because of communication problems rather than technical challenges. That’s why it’s so important to work on a Master’s project as a team,” says professor of informatics Lorenz Hilty. “The aim is for students to learn how to deal with the typical challenges that they’ll also encounter in practice in the real world: communication problems, difficult project management, complex links between different stakeholders.”
Back to the market: the students get to choose their own topic. The instructors give a brief pitch to present the assignment. Ann-Kathrin Kübler and Hannah Rohe – both studying for a Master’s degree – are looking for a topic for their project thesis. They only know each other fleetingly, but they sense that they might work well together. Ann-Kathrin already has a Bachelor’s degree in economics; her main area of focus in her informatics degree is data science. Hannah’s domain is software systems. The pair are looking for a topic whose content will challenge them and contribute to sustainable development.
They pause in front of the “stall” of Lorenz Hilty. They know the professor of informatics from lectures. Also present is Matthias Huss, an economist at UZH who researches food systems and has spent many years working with Lorenz Hilty on sustainability. A number of years previously, Huss teamed up with his colleague Michael Brander to initiate a research program investigating crop losses in sub-Saharan Africa.
Hilty and Huss explain the topic to the students: the content focuses on questions of nutrition and harvest crises in Africa. The task for the students is to develop a tool that can be used to simulate communication paths. The UZH researchers worked with researchers from the Sokoine University of Agriculture in Tanzania to collect the required data. Hannah and Ann-Kathrin are all ears.
In the case of maize, for example, crop losses in sub-Saharan Africa amount to around 30 percent. They’re generally caused by insect infestation and mold. This is why the farmers sell as much maize as they can as soon as it’s harvested because they know that the insects will destroy all the grain in storage if they get the chance. As a consequence, there are frequently food shortages before the next harvest because there’s no more maize available. “There’s a simple way to reduce the losses to almost zero percent,” Huss explains to the students. “We've found that airtight harvest sacks work really well.” The sacks weighing a hundred kilos can be sealed so that the maize is protected from any insect infestation or mold. The exclusion of air causes the insects to die.
Huss shows the students a harvest sack to give them a demonstration. These sacks are sold in Tanzania for the equivalent of around two dollars. But so far, just three percent of small-scale farmers are using the sacks, even though the price is fair. “We discovered that the sacks can reduce severe food insecurity by 40 percent,” says Huss. The question is just how best to reach the local people to spread the word about how the sacks can benefit them.
“And this is where we come back to the informatics project,” explains Hilty to the two students. It’s all about using the data collected in the project as the basis for modeling how training and communication are linked. The students get data about the distribution of the sacks and the harvest yields in individual regions from Tanzania. They also receive information about the forms of communication that are normally used on site.
Word-of-mouth, community discussions, influential village elders or instructors who are sent to the villages to explain how the sacks work – they all play a role. The model that the students will develop aims to simulate how information is communicated within this system and calculate which interventions have the most impact in each area under consideration.
Hannah and Ann-Kathrin are excited at the idea of being able to undertake a Master’s project to make a contribution to improving food security. Informatics student Joël Inglin subsequently joins the group, turning the duo into a trio.
Two years later and in the 2024 fall semester, we meet the three students – who’ve now been presented with the semester award – at the Knowledge Center for Sustainable Development* in Zurich. “The working atmosphere here is excellent, there’s plenty of space and the infrastructure is perfect for project theses,” says Joël. “I can recall that we met each other here regularly and spent a lot of time planning things before we programmed the simulation model,” recounts Hannah. “Thanks to the precise timetable and the carefully considered way we split up the work, we didn’t lose focus and kept our eyes on the ultimate objective.”
Lorenz Hilty, retired professor by now, recommended that, as the basis for developing their simulation model, the students should use software that had been developed by a previous Master’s student. “The first thing we had to do was understand this code,” recalls Joël.
“The three students received the semester award because they got to grips with a very complex situation and worked together as a team to come up with very well thought-out and innovative solutions,” says Hilty. To be able to develop the previous model in an expedient way, they had to analyze its strengths and weaknesses in great detail. At the same time, they needed to find out which requirements need to be met to enable the researchers in Tanzania to actually use the model. In practice, complex situations like this are very much the norm, according to Hilty. “In software projects, you always have to weigh up carefully what is desirable, technically possible and feasible with the resources available. To allow the students to practice this, I think it’s very important for them to work independently.”
One example of the multifarious challenges that students will face is coordination within a team. “The more independently the students work within a joint project and the greater their scope to be creative, the better they need to communicate with each other,” says Hilty.
And how did the students find working in a team? “The exciting nature of the assignment meant we were highly motivated and very keen to work,” summarizes Ann-Kathrin Kübler. It's important to take the time to have discussions within the group and find a good way of handling different ways of working. Hannah Rohe says that the practical knowledge of Matthias Huss helped them, adding: “Matthias Huss knows the situation on the ground really well, and this provided our modeling with the detailed real-life connection that it needed.” Matthias Huss himself is also satisfied: his colleagues at the university in Tanzania now work with the tool and Huss hopes that there will soon be more harvest sacks circulating within the local population.
*At the Knowledge Center for Sustainable Development, the four universities in the canton of Zurich (UZH, PH, ZHDK and ZHAW) work together across various disciplines in the area of sustainability.
Website: ZKSD – Zurich Knowledge Center for Sustainable Development
