I apologize if this post doesn’t quite match this subreddit, but I’m really looking for suggestions from active practitioners and researchers in the field and this looks like a great place to find one!

I’m a computer engineering student, about to begin my last year of bachelor’s degree. As you could imagine, the AI course I had to take was nothing but primitive search algorithms. But with the help of one of my professors, I was able to study ML and DL in particular, using a number of courses and a few books. Right now I’ve one paper almost ready for submission and a novel model on its way (both GAN-related).

Now I’m wondering about the subject of my thesis. I talked to my professor a while ago and he suggested to work on a model that could take in a face and output the same person at some specific age. But I was kinda hoping to work on something more practical which other people could use as well.

I had the idea of creating an application, sorta a graphical interface to Keras, which would allow the user to create the computation graph, make the training loop and normalize the data. After giving some thoughts to this idea, I came to the realization that such a tool can never offer the same range of possibilities a programmer would have with the library itself. Then I thought about targeting the practitioners and focusing more on the mainstream architectures but that sounded hard to finish in just one year, as well. I’m not sure if a beta version would be worth pursuing, with the hope that I could finish it during my masters.

The reason that I’m aiming at projects like this is that I’m hoping to get a scholarship to continue my studies abroad which I won’t be able to afford on my own in any way (I’m Iranian and if you check the value of our currency, you’d realize why). I’m hoping to prove my capabilities in my thesis project. My professor says that if I get even a single paper published, that’s enough for a bachelor student, but… you can never be too sure!

Another idea that I’m not exactly sure is worth the effort or not is working on some sort of a knowledge base for ML. With the every growing amount of publications in this field, it’s getting harder and harder to dive through them, specifically when it comes to comparing models. Now imagine a website with a taxonomy system that allows for a tree-like categorizing system which researchers could introduce their models in and others add their own experiences, implementations, etc. Unfortunately, I’d only be able to implement the website and absolutely no where near knowledgeable enough to populate it…

I’d greatly appreciate it if you could guide me towards a some type of a project that would be an impressive point in my resume to get an scholarship.