I finished my dissertation a couple of months ago, and since graduated. Finishing was a great feeling, but I certainly remember the time when I thought I was losing control of the whole thing. I thought my experiments would fail to produce any positive results, and I lost any confidence I would finish at all. A time of sleepless nights and distracted days, but I learned I’m not alone in feeling that way whilst trying to get my dissertation to come together. To anyone else who’s in that place, try not to get too stressed and negative about it. Stay focussed on what you want to achieve and keep going. If I can do it, you can – it will come together.
Here’s the final result of all that work, Pattern Recognition in Computer System Events – Paul Brabban, published here in the School of Computer Science library. If you want to read it, I’d suggest having a skim over the introduction and then maybe skip to the conclusions. If you’re still interested then the detail is in the middle sections and if you want to try and reproduce my work, there is an appendix detailing some of the implementation choices I made.
I’m lucky to have had such great tuition and support at Manchester, not to mention the excellent supervision I received for my project from Dr. Gavin Brown. I was also very happy to receive some great feedback from my external examiner, Professor Muffy Calder at the University of Glasgow. I couldn’t have done the project without the support of the industry partner, so thanks to them and their representatives. My mum and stepbrother painstakingly proofread my later drafts and picked out any number of grammatical errors, and my wife, my friends and my family supported me and listened to me going on and on about computer science geekery.
My eternal gratitude to everyone I’ve mentioned and anyone I’ve forgotten!
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