Projects
At the Center for Project-Based Learning (PBL), we offer hands-on projects that allow students to apply their knowledge, develop new skills, and collaborate on real-world challenges. Below, you’ll find our current projects open for applications. Whether you’re looking to innovate, prototype, or conduct cutting-edge research, this is your chance to get involved!
Interested in past projects? Click here to explore previous student work and get inspired.
Embedded Firmware development for high performance PTU
Join an exciting opportunity to develop and extend low-level firmware for a high-performance pan-tilt unit (PTU) powered by an STM32 microcontroller. This open-source project focuses on enhancing existing motor control firmware with modern networking and remote-control capabilities to create a modular, low-latency control system. Ideal for students looking to make meaningful contributions to embedded systems in robotics or automation.
Keywords
ptu,embedded,c,firmware,low-level,tcp,udp,protocol
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Semester Project , Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-05-20 , Earliest start: 2025-05-20 , Latest end: 2026-03-31
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Mandula Jakub
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Text2Video: Fast Text-Driven Video Generation
This project aims to leverage existing text-to-video generative models [1, 2] to produce video content based on textual prompts. Unlike conventional approaches that prioritize high quality, the main objective of this project is low-latency efficient video generation
Keywords
Video Generation, Efficient Inference, Real-Time Synthesis
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-05-14 , Earliest start: 2025-06-02 , Latest end: 2026-10-05
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Bonazzi Pietro
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Low Power Wireless On-Body Communication for Body-attached Sensor Nodes
Wearable, wirelessly connected sensors have become a common part of daily life, evolving step by step from their roots in sports and fitness to play a pivotal role in shaping the future of personalized healthcare. A key challenge in this evolution is designing devices that are unobtrusive, highly integrated, and energy efficient. These design requirements inherently demand smaller batteries, which must also support the significant power consumption of wireless communication interfaces. Capacitive Human Body Communication (HBC) offers a promising, power-efficient alternative to traditional RF-based communication, enabling point-to-multipoint data and energy exchange. By using the conductive properties of the human body, a privacy-preserving wireless personal body area network (WBAN) can be created. Several low-power sensors such as ECG-tracker and insulin pumps can act as leaf devices, sending personal data to a body-central gateway, such as a smartwatch that further processes the data and establishes a connection to the cloud. .
Keywords
Hardware design, Firmware design, analog circuit design, digital circuit design, signal processing, field evaluation
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Energy Harvesting (PBL) , Semester Project , Master Thesis , Microcontroller (PBL) , PCB Design (PBL) , Software (PBL) , Firmware (PBL) , Machine Learning (PBL) , Biomedical (PBL) , Wearables (PBL)
Description
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Published since: 2025-05-12
Applications limited to Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Schulthess Lukas
Topics Engineering and Technology
Convolutional Differentiable Logic Gate Networks for Object Localization
Building on the advancements of LogicTreeNet, this project aims to extend convolutional differentiable logic gate networks (LGNs) to address object localization in computer vision
Keywords
Neuro-symbolic AI, Object Localization
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Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-05-12 , Earliest start: 2025-01-06 , Latest end: 2025-12-31
Applications limited to Università della Svizzera italiana , IBM Research Zurich Lab , ETH Zurich , EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne , Empa , Swiss National Science Foundation , CERN
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Bonazzi Pietro
Topics Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology , Behavioural and Cognitive Sciences
Pushing Ultrasound to the Limit: 100 Gbit Ethernet Interface for Imaging at the Edge of Physics
Next-generation ultrasound (US) imaging demands exceptionally high data throughput, exceeding 90 Gbps for ultrafast applications. This project harnesses datacenter networking techniques—100G Ethernet, RDMA, and HPC-grade storage—to enable real-time streaming of raw US data at minimal latency. By integrating advanced optical interfaces and bypassing conventional CPU-intensive workflows, this project aims to achieve sustained multi-gigabit performance, paving the way for cutting-edge imaging analytics and machine learning within modern datacenter environments
Keywords
Datacenter networking, 100G Ethernet, HPC, RDMA, Infiniband, high-speed streaming, ultrasound, Linux kernel programming
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Semester Project , Master Thesis , FPGA (PBL) , Software (PBL) , Firmware (PBL) , Biomedical (PBL)
Description
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Published since: 2025-04-08 , Earliest start: 2025-07-01
Applications limited to Department of Computer Science , Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Villani Federico
Topics Engineering and Technology
Leveraging Quantized Transformer Architectures for Brain-to-Text Mapping
Deep learning has increasingly replaced traditional classification algorithms in time-series analysis, with architectures such as RNNs, LSTMs, GRUs, and CNNs demonstrating significant success [1]. Among them, CNN-based models like InceptionTime [2] have set benchmarks in classification performance. Meanwhile, transformer architectures have revolutionized fields like Computer Vision (CV) and Natural Language Processing (NLP), often surpassing conventional architectures. Their potential in time-series classification is still emerging [3].
Keywords
Telepathy, EEG-to-Text
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Semester Project , Bachelor Thesis , Master Thesis
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Published since: 2025-03-28 , Earliest start: 2025-04-01 , Latest end: 2026-09-01
Applications limited to ETH Zurich
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Bonazzi Pietro
Topics Mathematical Sciences , Information, Computing and Communication Sciences , Engineering and Technology
Transformer-based model for Gesture Recognition
A major shortcoming of current gesture recognition methods is lack of robustness w.r.t. wearing position, changing users, background activities, etc. Addressing this requires research in various areas, such as new network architectures, model generalization methods, data-collection and data-engineering methods, and the specific choice of gestures. The project aims to explore some or all of these points.
Keywords
Times-Series, Gesture Recognition
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Semester Project , Master Thesis , ETH Zurich (ETHZ)
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Published since: 2025-02-10 , Earliest start: 2025-02-17 , Latest end: 2025-12-15
Applications limited to ETH Zurich , EPFL - Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Organization Center for Project-Based Learning D-ITET
Hosts Bonazzi Pietro
Topics Engineering and Technology