Jakub leads the following courses at the Institute for Geoinformatics:

• Wayfinding and Navigation (MSc, 5 ECTS, Winter Semester, together with Angela Schwering)
• Spatial Cognition (MSc, 4 ECTS, Summer Semester)
• Core Topic in GI Science (MSc, 3 ECTS, Summer Semester)
• Graduate School of Geoinformatics Colloquium (PhD, both semesters)

Open thesis topics

Current open Bachelor and Master topics are listed on the ifgi theses portal: ifgi.uni-muenster.de/ifgilogin/theses/.

LLM use policy

These rules apply to all theses with Jakub Krukar acting as the first supervisor and all written assignments within courses taught by Jakub Krukar.

I encourage students to use modern LLMs as tools that support learning, but not replace it. They can help you brainstorm, plan the structure of your work, and navigate large amounts of literature — provided you have actually read and understood the sources you eventually cite. I recommend this method for reading larger amounts of research literature.

However, most students misuse LLMs, which leads to shallow, nonsensical, or incorrect phrasing. Submitting a long text with good English but poor logic or shallow explanation does not guarantee a passing grade. Be careful, because this is what you get “by default” from LLM chatbots. Such texts may look impressive, especially if you haven’t engaged deeper with the topic, but the quality of the academic argument is often mediocre or unacceptable for a Master-level course. The average grades of written assignments in my courses seem to have decreased since the widespread availability of LLMs.

The core requirement in all written assignments and theses: you must understand, justify, and defend everything you submit. In-depth engagement with the topic and independent thinking are valued over length and sophisticated prose. When in doubt, I may ask you to explain selected paragraphs in person.

Permitted and encouraged use of LLMs

• brainstorming, outlining, structuring your argument
• exploring literature and identifying relevant papers
• clarifying concepts you have trouble understanding (but verify at source, e.g. with RAG)
• improving fluency of written text, trying different styles or connections between arguments

Discouraged or unacceptable use

• generating long passages and submitting them without deep revision
• relying on LLMs to construct arguments you cannot explain
• using unchecked or unread references
• submitting generic, vague, or technically shallow text

Quality criteria — your grade depends on:

• rigour and conceptual precision
• depth of understanding
• correctness of information and references
• clear connection to course material and in-class discussions
• originality and independent thought
• density of ideas relative to text length (higher grade for brief but technically precise text; much worse grade for long shallow texts)

Red flags (automatic fail)

• hallucinated references or mis-citing a reference that does not support the given argument
• logical incoherence between fragments of the text
• arguments that are technically incorrect or cannot be defended
• lack of understanding of your own submission, e.g. using words or phrases that you cannot explain

How to write a good MSc thesis at SPARC

A good thesis is dense with content, clearly structured, and reproducible. I recommend submitting your thesis in the format of a journal article. This saves you some writing but forces you to be precise and concise. Specific requirements:

• Formatted according to the guidelines of the Journal of Environmental Psychology (if your thesis contains an experiment with human participants), the International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction (if it focuses on evaluating the usability of some user-centred technology), or Environment and Planning B (if it focuses on developing new environmental metrics).
• All data collected from your study is published online (on GitHub, GitLab, or Open Science Framework), kept tidy, in open file format (such as .csv), and described in a README (what each column means, any outliers excluded from analyses, anything other researchers need to know in order to re-use your data).
• All material used to generate the experiment (questionnaires, apps, VR environments, videos, and other stimuli shown to participants) is published online together with the data.
• The oral defense of your thesis must take place one month prior to the submission deadline or later. If your research includes an experiment with human participants, you must complete all data collection and statistical analyses before your defense. The thesis may be in draft form at the time of defense, but the key findings must be established and all data and materials accessible in an online appendix. If no institute-wide defense date meets these requirements, contact me to arrange an individual one.