PhD and PostDoc positions

To apply for a PhD position, please send your CV and transcript of records to dial-apply@inf.ethz.ch, using [PhD] or [PostDoc] in the subject line.

* ETH requires a master's degree before starting the PhD program, details here. The Direct Doctorate program accepts students without one.
* You can also apply for a PhD fellowship through the ETH AI Center.

MSc and BSc theses, Semester projects

To apply for a thesis or project, please send your CV and transcript of records to dial-apply@inf.ethz.ch. There are always theses topics available. The lists below are a non-exhaustive selection of open topics, running projects and completed ones.

* We appreciate your patience, as response times vary. We receive many requests and unfortunately cannot accommodate every student.

Open topics

We have open topics and will post them here soon.

Ongoing

• BSc thesis
  2026
  Realistic Cardinality Estimation for Vector Range Search

  Julio Philip Schneider · Advised by Theo Wübker, Vasilis Mageirakos, Yannis Chronis

Completed

• MSc thesis
  2026
  Relation-Aware Retrieval for Long, Visually Rich Documents

  Riccardo Rigoni · Advised by Vasilis Mageirakos, Yannis Chronis
• MSc thesis
  2026
  Depth-Based Adaptive IVF Search for Difficult Queries

  Xiaofei Wu · Advised by Vasilis Mageirakos, Yannis Chronis
• MSc thesis
  2026
  Optimizing Quality and Performance in Vector Search

  Haofeng Yang · Advised by Vasilis Mageirakos, Yannis Chronis
• BSc thesis
  2026
  Adaptive Index Structures for Vector Search Under Non-Stationary Query Distribution

  Elena Aschmann · Advised by Dimitris Banelas, Yannis Chronis
• Semester project
  2026
  Can one Workload Rule them All? OLTP Benchmarking in the Wild

  Eduard-Alex Mihai · Advised by Oto Mraz, Yannis Chronis, Asterios Katsifodimos
• MSc thesis
  2026
  Skein: a DuckDB extension for topology-aware semantic query processing over a co-located LLM

  Diana-Cristiana Micloiu · Advised by Bowen Wu, Yannis Chronis
• Semester project
  2026
  Vector Search with Out-of-Distribution Queries

  Anil Eren Göçer · Advised by Vasilis Mageirakos, Yannis Chronis
• MSc thesis
  2026
  Experimental Evaluation of Data Reduction Strategies for Efficient Vector Similarity Search

  Petrit Gjokaj · Advised by Yannis Chronis
• BSc thesis
  2026
  Attribute–Embedding Correlation: a distribution divergence approach to filtered vector search

  Matteo Iulian Adam · Advised by Vasilis Mageirakos, Dan Olteanu, Yannis Chronis
• Research fellowship
  2026
  GPU Buffer Pool

  Natalie Tang · Advised by Sven Hepkema, Theo Wübker, Yannis Chronis