The list of figures should be sensible, not paragraph length things. You can achieve this with an additional argument to caption:
\caption[stuff for list]{stuff that appears with figure}
One of the few things the university cares about is stuff running into the margins. You have to fix things like the footnotes on page 1. (Doing URLs in italic helps a lot.)
The current chapter 1 is too short and too introductory. It should give an outline of the ideas, approach and contributions of your dissertation, not just one paragraph. Maybe Gabor’s is a reasonable example.
My 3 comments without actually reading it are: