Writing Your Thesis

A thesis is not a report of everything you did — it is a coherent scientific argument. Every chapter, every section, every sentence should serve a single purpose: to convince the reader that you identified a meaningful problem, approached it rigorously, and produced results worth trusting. This guide walks you through the format requirements, structure, advisor relationship, writing conventions, and referencing practices expected at AIRLab.

Templates & Formats

All theses must be written in LaTeX using the official Politecnico di Milano templates, available on Overleaf (PoliMI templates). PoliMI provides Overleaf premium accounts for all students, so you can write your thesis online without installing anything. Each template comes in two manuscript formats:

Regardless of the format you choose, the content requirements are the same. The article format is not a "lighter" version of the thesis — it is simply a more concise way to present the same material. The choice between them should be based on which structure better suits your work and writing style, not on perceived effort or page count. Depending on the scope of your thesis, you have different requirements for the final manuscript:

Executive summary

Every thesis and tesina must be accompanied by an executive summary — a separate 6-page document (references included) that summarises the entire thesis: motivation, approach, results, and conclusions. The executive summary is submitted alongside the thesis.

Thesis Structure

A thesis is complete when there are results to account for and the manuscript has been proofread. The usual structure of the thesis is as follows:

1. Introduction. Set the context, state the objectives, summarise the methodology, and preview the main results. A reader should finish this chapter knowing exactly what the thesis is about and why it matters.
2. State of the Art. Survey the background knowledge and existing solutions. Identify the gap that motivates your work. Only include work that is directly relevant — do not pad this chapter with loosely related citations.
3. Proposed Approach. Present your method with full motivation. Explain why you made the design choices you did. Equations, diagrams, and pseudocode belong here.
4. Evaluation. Report quantitative results. Describe your experimental setup in enough detail that the experiments could be replicated. Discuss limitations honestly.
5. Conclusions. Summarise your key findings, their significance, and concrete directions for future work.

Working with Your Advisor

Three figures are involved in evaluating your thesis work:

• Advisor (relatore) — guides the research direction and ensures scientific quality.
• Co-advisor (correlatore) — a PhD student or postdoc providing technical guidance. Your primary point of contact for implementation questions.
• Discussant (controrelatore) — an independent professor assigned by the advisor after thesis submission, present at the defence. Their assessment directly affects your final mark. Only required for the full thesis, not the tesina.

Send chapters to your advisor and co-advisor one at a time, as soon as they are ready. Early feedback catches mistakes before they propagate through the rest of the manuscript.

Writing Style

You are encouraged to use LLM assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to improve English grammar and scientific style. They are invaluable tools for polishing prose. Needless to say, they are not meant for generating original content. The ideas, claims, results, and citations must all be yours. Always double-check every piece of information an LLM produces: they hallucinate references, misstate facts, and confidently produce plausible-sounding errors.

Voice, tense, and tone

• First person. Use "We" (even for single authors) consistently throughout.
• Present or past tense. Choose one and stick to it. Reserve the future tense exclusively for the Future Work section.
• No contractions. Write "did not" instead of "didn't", "it is" instead of "it's".
• Be specific. Replace vague claims ("the results are good") with quantitative ones ("the method achieves 3.2 % lower error than the baseline").
• Write positively. Avoid framing your contribution as a list of things you did not do.

Punctuation and capitalisation

• No space before commas, periods, colons, or semicolons.
• Capitalise proper names and specific numbered elements: "Figure 2.1", "Table 3", "Chapter 4" — but not "the previous section" or "the figure above". Always use the \ref command (no explicit numbering) for referencing figures, tables, and chapters.
• Equations are part of the sentence and follow normal punctuation rules — end them with a comma or period as required by the surrounding text. This applies for both inline and displayed equations.

Plagiarism

Always cite the source for images you did not create yourself, and for any text reproduced verbatim. Use quotation marks for direct quotes. Paraphrasing without citation is still plagiarism.

Figures & Bibliography

Figures and tables

• Placement. Figures and tables should appear at the top of the page where they are first referenced — never before.
• Vector formats. Use PDF or SVG for all plots and diagrams. If you must use raster formats (PNG, JPEG), ensure a resolution of at least 300 DPI at the printed size.
• Self-contained figures. Every axis must have a label with units. Every line or bar must appear in a legend. A reader should be able to understand a figure without hunting through the surrounding text.
• Captions. Write a descriptive caption that explains what the figure shows and what to take away from it. Use the two-argument form so the list of figures stays readable:
  Copy

  latex

  \caption[Short caption for the list of figures or tables]{Full description of what the figure shows and what the reader should take away.}

Bibliography

Every bibliography entry must include: authors, title, venue (journal name or conference proceedings), year, and publisher. To get the BibTeX entry for a paper:

1. Search for the paper on Google Scholar.
2. Click the Cite button.
3. Click BibTeX at the bottom of the dialog.
4. Copy the entry into your .bib file.