Individual Projects

In addition to our periodically scheduled project courses (see right column), you can also participate in a number of individual and group projects. Depending on your program and its exam regulation, these can be credited as a master project module. Please contact us for details. Note that some of the proposed project works are also offered as Bachelor's or Master's  thesis. Size and difficulty will be adapted to the kind of work that is finally done.

“Topics on Systems Performance Engineering (upon Request),” Bachelor or Master's thesis or individual Master's Project, B. Erb (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., – Open.
Performance measurements, performance evaluations, and performance engineering play an important role when designing and implementing complex software systems and distributed architectures. If you are interested in this area and seek a potential topic, please contact me for further discussion and drafting.
“Topics at the Intersection of Psychology and Privacy (upon Request),” Bachelor or Master's thesis or individual Master's Project, B. Erb (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., – Open.
Human psychology impacts users in their privacy behavior. This is relevant for understanding user behavior, but also when designing technical privacy solutions. If you are interested in this intersection of psychology and privacy and seek a potential topic, please contact me for further discussion and drafting.
“Topics on Data-intensive Systems (upon Request),” Bachelor or Master's thesis or individual Master's Project, B. Erb (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., – Open.
Data-intensive systems manage and process large volumes of data. These systems come with inherent challenges in terms of scalability, parallelism, programming models, architectures etc. If you are interested in this area and seek a potential topic, please contact me for further discussion and drafting.
“AI-Assisted System Performance Data Analysis with Local Models,” Master's thesis, B. Erb (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., – Open.
System performance evaluations produce quantities of structured data sets from measurements. These data sets need to be further analyzed to derive actual insights. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate how humans can be assisted in such analyses by (smaller) large language models (LLMs) that can run locally on commodity hardware. However, as LLMs are primarily good in processing and generating text-based content, this may require additional tooling to handle structured data and statistical analyses. As part of the thesis, different approaches and concrete solutions should be explored and compared. This thesis project is provided in collaboration with benchANT GmbH.
“AI-Assisted Performance Engineering of Software Systems,” Master's thesis, B. Erb (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., – Open.
Increasingly capable AI models cannot only be used to vibe code projects without any programming skills, but also to assist engineers when enhancing, refactoring, and securing existing code. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate how well such models can be utilized for improving the performance of existing applications by identifying and mitigating performance issues. The thesis should particularly focus on publicly available coding models that can be deployed locally (e.g., gpt-oss:20b, Qwen3.5-coder:35b, glm-4.7-flash, gemma4:31b). As part of thesis, appropriate use cases for benchmarking the models need to be identified from literature and preparated. This involves different performance issues in software code - both obvious and rather subtle and difficult to detect. The models should then be tested and evaluated against these cases and finally synthesized in a comparative summary.
“Machine Learning–Based Quantification of Security Mechanism Outputs into Subjective Logic Opinions in V2X Environments,” Project or Bachelor's thesis or Master's thesis, A. Hermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2026 – Open.
Security mechanisms in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) environments, such as misbehavior detection systems, generate outputs that indicate potential malicious behavior but do not directly provide a unified and interpretable trust representation. This thesis investigates methods for quantifying such outputs into subjective logic opinions that can be used by trust assessment frameworks. The focus lies on a machine learning–based approach that learns the mapping from security mechanism outputs to belief, disbelief, and uncertainty values. The proposed method will be compared against existing quantification techniques to evaluate improvements in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability. The evaluation will be conducted using realistic V2X datasets and scenarios.
“Improving the UDS deterministic scheduler by a-priori application knowledge,” Bachelor's thesis or Project, F. J. Hauck (Supervisor), F. J. Hauck (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2026 – Open.
State-machine replication is a concept to achieve fault tolerance. Each replica has be executed in a deterministic way. In order to allow concurrency so called deterministic multithreading approaches were developed, one of them is called the UDS scheduler. The task of this work is to extend the UDS implementation in order to inject application knowledge into the scheduling decisions so that more concurrency can be achieved compared to no knowledge. The knowledge is injected by calling methods in the scheduler by the application. Multiple different of such methods are to be implemented (e.g., last lock, next lock) and integrated into the scheduling algorithm. Further especially for a Bachelor's thesis some evaluations should be applied in order to show the benefit of the injected knowledge. The work will need some acquaintance with the theoretical basics of the UDS scheduler. The implementation needs skills in Java.
“Design and evaluation of a benchmark dataset for GNSS spoofing detection systems,” Project, A. Hermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2026 – Open.
GNSS spoofing poses a significant threat to systems relying on accurate positioning, particularly in safety-critical domains such as autonomous driving. However, the evaluation of spoofing detection methods is often limited by the lack of standardized benchmark datasets. This project addresses this gap by designing and implementing a benchmark dataset for GNSS spoofing detection systems. The dataset includes diverse and realistic spoofing scenarios with well-defined ground truth, enabling systematic and reproducible evaluation. The dataset is validated using existing GNSS spoofing detection approaches.
“Evaluation of AI-Based and Non-AI-Based Misbehavior Detection Systems,” Project or Bachelor's thesis or Master's thesis, A. Hermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2025 – Open.
The growing connectivity of cooperative intelligent transportation systems (C-ITS) raises critical security concerns, particularly regarding the trustworthiness of exchanged information. Misbehavior Detection Systems (MDS) play a key role in identifying malicious or faulty behavior in vehicular networks. This thesis evaluates both AI-based and non-AI-based MDS approaches, comparing their detection performance and computational efficiency under different attack scenarios. Using a structured benchmarking framework and representative vehicular datasets, the study analyzes different kinds of MBDs.
“Evaluation of Intrusion Detection Systems in In-Vehicle Networks,” Project or Bachelor's thesis or Master's thesis, A. Hermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2025 – Open.
Modern vehicles rely on complex in-vehicle networks to support safety-critical and comfort functions. As these networks become more interconnected, they face increasing security risks from malicious attacks and faulty components. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) are essential for detecting abnormal behavior and protecting the integrity of in-vehicle communication. This thesis evaluates different IDS approaches for automotive networks, including rule-based and machine learning methods. Using representative datasets and realistic attack scenarios, the study compares detection accuracy, false positive rates, and computational efficiency
“Enhancing Trustworthiness in Generated Information by Finetuning Llama 3 8b,” Project, D. Eisermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2025 – Open.
This project will focus on improving the trustworthiness of generated information through the fine-tuning of the Llama 3 8b model using the Unsloth training performance optimization library. The primary goal is to enhance the reliability and accuracy of AI-generated content by leveraging advanced training techniques. The research will involve evaluating the performance of the Llama 3 8b model before and after fine-tuning, analyzing improvements in trustworthiness metrics, and developing new methodologies to further optimize the model’s performance.
“A Comparison of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) with Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) for Image Classification,” Project, D. Eisermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2025 – Open.
This project will investigate the performance differences between Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) in the context of image classification tasks. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks offer a novel approach to neural network architecture based on mathematical foundations that differ from traditional MLPs. The primary goal of this research is to empirically compare these two types of neural networks to evaluate their classification accuracy. The outcome of this research may provide insights into the potential advantages of KANs over conventional MLPs in practical applications.
“Enhancing Trustworthiness in Generated Information by Finetuning Llama 3 8b,” Project, D. Eisermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2024 – Open.
This project will focus on improving the trustworthiness of generated information through the fine-tuning of the Llama 3 8b model using the Unsloth training performance optimization library. The primary goal is to enhance the reliability and accuracy of AI-generated content by leveraging advanced training techniques. The research will involve evaluating the performance of the Llama 3 8b model before and after fine-tuning, analyzing improvements in trustworthiness metrics, and developing new methodologies to further optimize the model’s performance.
“A Comparison of Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) with Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) for Image Classification,” Project, D. Eisermann (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2024 – Open.
This project will investigate the performance differences between Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs) and Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) in the context of image classification tasks. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks offer a novel approach to neural network architecture based on mathematical foundations that differ from traditional MLPs. The primary goal of this research is to empirically compare these two types of neural networks to evaluate their classification accuracy. The outcome of this research may provide insights into the potential advantages of KANs over conventional MLPs in practical applications.
“Applications for the LoRaPark Ulm,” Project, F. Kargl (Supervisor), F. Kargl (Examiner), Inst. of Distr. Sys., Ulm Univ., 2020 – Open.
Contact

Secretary's Office

Marion Köhler
Jessica Reib
E-Mail
Phone: +49 731 50-24140
Fax: +49 731 50-24142

Postal Address

Institute of Distributed Systems
Ulm University
Albert-Einstein-Allee 11
89081 Ulm

Visiting Address

James-Franck-Ring
Building O27, Room 349
89081 Ulm

Office Hours

Monday, Tuesday 7am to 12pm
Wednesday, Thursday from 7am to 4pm
Friday 8am to 2pm

Directions