Master Thesis
Recent Submissions
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REDD+ Benefit Sharing to Local Communities: Exploring Design Features and Contextual Factors of REDD+ Projects at the Global Landscape
(2023)This master's thesis explores the benefits and influencing factors of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Plus (REDD+) projects in local communities. The study analyzes empirical data to gain insights into the benefits provided by REDD+ projects and their influencing factors (i.e., certification standards, legal tenure rights, finance sources, and regional factors). The research analyzes empirical data collected ...Master Thesis -
Cooperate or Collapse: Emergence of Sustainability in a Society of LLM Agents
(2024)Master Thesis -
Optimizing Data-Centric Applications - A Machine Learning Approach to Optimizations in DaCe
(2024)Program optimization is an increasingly important task due to the diverse range of hardware platforms available today. Manually finding code transformations that optimize the performance of programs is time-consuming and requires domain-specific expertise. Some compiler frameworks therefore resort to heuristics in combination with automatic optimization techniques that utilize machine learning-based cost models to predict how well code ...Master Thesis -
How many people do coastal ecosystems protect from tropical cyclones globally?
(2022)Natural Climate Solutions (NCS) are key to climate change mitigation, but can also deliver important co-benefits, such as disaster risk reduction and adaptation to climate change. Previous research has used a variety of methods to assess NCS and ecosystem-based risk reduction. The overarching question this thesis aims to answer is: How many people do coastal ecosystems protect from the impacts of tropical cyclones and resulting storm ...Master Thesis -
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Investigation of Higher-Order Tracer Advection in ICON
(2024)The latest simulations show diminishing gains of spatial higher-order reconstructions in the ICON horizontal tracer transport. This work provides a theoretical description of the semi-Lagrangian discretization method for the tracer mass continuity equation with a focus on the inherent approximations. Our numerical results for the isolated vertical and horizontal transport reveal various weaknesses of the numerical schemes that are ...Master Thesis -
Revisiting Stress and Strain Fields in Switzerland with Focus on the South-Western Alps
(2023)The state of stress of a region plays an important role in seismic hazard assessment. Especially the evaluation of the potential of reactivating pre-existing faults is thus a crucial component of the hazard assessment of natural and anthropogenic seismicity. In addition, mapping the stress field also helps to understand regional tectonic processes. A common procedure to assess the state of stress and its regional variations is the analysis ...Master Thesis -
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The Impact of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation on Tropical Cyclone Socio-Economic Risks
(2023)The El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) is the most important inter-annual signal of climate variability on the planet. It affects many natural hazards, including tropical cyclones (TCs), which are known for causing severe economic losses and many fatalities. However, although research efforts have examined ENSO’s influence on TC characteristics in different basins, the transfer from findings on ENSO’s impact on TC hazard into global ...Master Thesis -
Reconstructing Pre-GRACE Terrestrial Water Storage Anomalies Using Deep Learning
(2024)Master Thesis -
Verification^2 of the Authentic Digital EMblem
(2024)A digital emblem is a cryptographically signed message that marks a set of assets as protected under International Humanitarian Law (IHL). Authorities such as nation-states create endorsements to attest to the authenticity of an emblem’s signature; In turn, endorsements can themselves be endorsed. Assets actively distribute emblems and endorsements using UDP, TLS, or DNS. Parties can thus independently run the protocol’s verification ...Master Thesis -
Continuous Optimization DAG Learning in the Presence of Location Scale Noise: A Systematic Evaluation of Different Frameworks
(2023)Causal discovery concerns the problem of learning the causal structures between variables of a system from observational data. To tackle the computational complexity when mul- tiple variables are involved, continuous optimization is a growing area. However, most approaches rely on additive noise, and no systematic evaluation of non-additive location- scale noise (LSN) has been performed. Modeling LSN or heteroscedasticity is important as ...Master Thesis -
Electrostatic Zipping Actuators with a Double-Helical Structure
(2023)Artificial muscles are key for creating soft and bio-mimetic robots. Despite substantial advances, current actuator technologies are still limited in their form factor and struggle to achieve high power and energy density while being efficient. This thesis focuses on a new actuator design that could potentially improve on those key metrics. We present an electrostatic zipping actuator with a double-helical structure. The thesis reports ...Master Thesis -
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Wachstum und Verbreitung der Weisstanne im Bergell
(2024)Die Klimaerwärmung sowie die zunehmenden Extremereignisse wie Hitzewellen, Starkregen oder Trockenperioden beeinflussen Wälder und Gebirgsökosysteme. Unter anderem werden Wälder vermehrt mit Trockenstress sowie Störungen konfrontiert. Die Aufrechterhaltung ihrer natürlichen Funktion wie auch die längerfristige Erhaltung der Schutzfunktion stellt deshalb eine grosse Herausforderung für die Forstdienste dar. Um die Wälder an den Klimawandel ...Master Thesis -
Abgrenzung der Wirtschaftlichkeit von lokbespannten Reisezügen gegenüber Triebzügen
(2016)In dieser Arbeit werden Anwendungsfälle abgegrenzt, in denen lokbespannte Reisezüge wirtschaftlicher sind als Triebzüge. Berücksichtigt werden dabei sowohl technische als auch betriebliche Aspekte inklusive Auslastung. Ausgehend von existierendem Rollmaterial sowie basierend auf Fachgesprächen wurde ein Zugmodell entwickelt, mit dem zahlreiche Konfigurationen abbildbar sind. Mithilfe realer Fahrgastzahlen wurde ein generisches Nachfragemodell ...Master Thesis -
Weak lensing map inference: a physics informed Gaussian process approach
(2024)In this work we propose the use of physically informed Gaussian processes (GP) to analyse cosmological fields at the map level. We will show that GPs can capture the statistical behaviour of cosmological fields, providing us with a likelihood as a function of the cosmological parameters conditioned to the map. In practice, we set the Gaussian process kernel to be the 2-point autocorrelation function associated to a 2D discrete flat-sky ...Master Thesis -
Increasing CCRIF's Risk Diversification under Climate Change: Strengthening Disaster Risk Financing Efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean
(2024)Risk disaster financing efforts are an important pillar for building resilience in the aftermath of an event to reduce macro-economic effects on a country’s economy through pre-agreed financial arrange- ments (Bollmann Andreas & Wang Shaun S., 2019). Moving from ex-post to ex-ante financial instru- ments the certainty on the amount of money and time delivered is increased which can positively in- fluence the recovery of a country (World ...Master Thesis -
Diffusion Policy for Collision Avoidance in a Two-Arm Robot Setup
(2024)Diffusion models in robotics have shown great potential with a wide range of applicability. Especially their capability to model multi-modal data distribution has many benefits when learning a task such as collision-free trajectory optimisation with dynamic moving objects. Collision avoidance is a central problem in robotics where classical approaches still suffer from non-optimal solutions or high computational costs. In this work, we ...Master Thesis -
Functional Neural Networks
(2024)With the technological advancements in data collection and storage, it is not uncommon to encounter situations where data are observed realizations of some underlying process defined over a continuous domain. Examples of such datasets are often found in finance, acoustics, medicine, engineering and many other disciplines. Functional data analysis (FDA) is a fairly recent field that offers a powerful framework for analyzing such data by ...Master Thesis