"Something with drones" is not a Software Engineering project. Writing a poem about drones is enough. On the other hand, if you can show future employers that you solved AI or Big Data as a senior project, the road ahead will be paved with yellow bricks.

The critical thing is to show your ability to execute and part of a portfolio is to provide a familiar context in which to discuss engineering decisions as engineering decisions.

Don't get me wrong, some students will have really cool ideas for their senior project. Many of them will have been thinking about it for a long time. A few of them will just be the sort of person who comes up with cool ideas. It's a bit late to try and become either type.

Good luck.

If there is a lesson from HN, it is that execution matters more than creativity. http://sivers.org/multiply

The reason for doing something open source is that you can point to it when a future employer asks. If you choose a "brand name" project, you can get a lot of kudos for being associated with something like that.

Also searching for "project name" AND "project ideas" could sometimes lead to good results. for example [1].But of course before choosing a project in such way , it's better to understand a bit more about complexity and scope.

[1]https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/ISIS/ProjectIdea...

Do a good job. With all the time you save, you can focus on doing things with drones or AI or whatever you want. Then inevitably when the scope of those projects goes out of control you won't have the stress hanging over you of it being for school and will be able to explore the domain with a light heart!

I helped build a website for a department when I was in college. I was paid a reasonable hourly rate in exchange for my services. In this case, the OP would be paying the university money in exchange for the privilege of building them a website. That's insane.

In general any time you do something for CS it's either trivial or if you had some qualification to back you up you could get paid; you're not paying for the privilege of designing their website you're paying for the support, guidance and ultimately assessment of your skills.

There is a problem of larger scope which is that education at a school level has been poor or non-existent as side effect of this is many people self-teach and then start university with skills way beyond their peers, web design is a good example of this because it's a relatively open platform that's easy and fun to get into, the result is that most universities must start from no assumed knowledge in the field.

It's only because you were able to teach yourself webdesign that you feel that the task is beneath you. If you really want to address this problem you need education to be better across the field so that university level can address significant tasks rather than filling in the basics for the first 2-3 years. This is starting to be addressed in the UK by the likes of the Raspberry Pi foundation and at a government level by mandated CS education in primary school but without incentives for teachers to take up the subject I don't know how effective it will be.

UNLESS you have a specific domain you want to work in. Or you have a company you want to get a job at and they work in a particular niche.

I also agree with zorrb, as I used to be plagued with wanting to go above and beyond with every academic project. The problem is you have limited time, and you can find a better use for it working on something that is more flexible.

It also helps to begin with a strong interest in a specific field, and extra knowledge to back it up, so you don't waste a lot of time doing introductory research to get up to speed.

If you're here, then you're likely more entrepreneurial. Do the easy project, and spend your extra time working on a start-up idea or connecting with classmates to find a co-founder for something bigger.

It wasn't on the lists of "wants", but implementing the Raft consensus protocol could be neat too. It was designed to be understandable and implementable. The video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbZ3zDzDnrw. The research paper is here: https://ramcloud.stanford.edu/wiki/download/attachments/1137...

Raft is conceptually deep, but code wise isn't actually that hard to do. However, it gives you a beautiful introduction to consensus algorithms which appear in many distributed systems.

That doesn't mean you cant explore these topics... just find something that you are passionate about, and aggressively scope it down for the first pass. If you succeed, you can always make it larger!

I know at my university, if I wanted to work on my own project, I had to submit a proposal several months in advance. In addition to that, I needed to have an outside stakeholder who wanted to "sponsor" the project.

1. The idea needs to be technically challenging.

2. The idea must be small enough in size to complete in the allotted time frame.

3. An outside stakeholder must "sponsor" the project to mimic the real world of working with others such as a project manager.

Mine was computer vision based, so you're welcome to take a look: https://github.com/SoftlySplinter/kyffin-digital-analysis

Not as fun: write a k-lambda [1] interpreter in x64 or ARM. More fun: write it in Python or Go. Not fun at all: write it in Verilog/VHDL.

Big data: I hope you like football! Just kidding, there are other datasets, too. You could simply create a responsive website for exploring the dataset. Or do some interesting analysis. Up to you. [2], [3]

[1] http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/shendoc.htm#The%20Pri...

[2] [large!] http://aragorn.org/data/sports/NFL/seasons/metadata_since_19...

[3] http://www.wired.com/2012/09/nfl-momentum/

2.1 If you're interested in "big data/analytics", why not look into Cloudera & Datameer, and talk to some people at the World Bank & the Inter-American Development Bank to see what problems you could solve for them?

2.2 Regarding AI, email/tweet some of the people at Deepmind & Vicarious (you can google for employee names) to see what they can suggest.

2.3 Regarding computer vision, try emailing Blaise Aguera or Johnny Lee to see what they consider "interesting" (or just google some of their work).

3. Finally, AND THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP: think about why you're doing this. Do you just want to get it over with so you can move onto something else? If so, pick a project that's relatively simple but difficult (running a marathon is simple but difficult). Otherwise, if you want something meaningful, choose something that will be fun. Choose a question that YOU want answered and that peaks your interest. Curiousity+fun will make the work feel like no work at all. GOOD LUCK!

A big pitfall of FYP is that aiming too high but actually struggled along the way

A website or some graphics tool kit, well, it might not be done, but the partial solution could be seen and you get good grades. I say go for the easy stuff, take your good grades and graduate. I believe that If you were really serious and had the chops you would have had a bunch of problems that interest you and you won't be asking us.

Do not lose track of how much your project contributes to your final grade (if you care about grades). It is so so easy to spend 99% of your time doing the fun project which counts towards 20% of your degree, leaving 1% of your time to study for the remaining 80%...

That said, having a decent project to show is at least if not more useful in getting a job out the other side (if that's what you want).

Good luck, would be interested to see what you end up picking.

- See more at: http://www.information-age.com/technology/information-manage...

I build a chess playing lego robot. What do take in mind is that you dont overeach. You have a set amount of time. Make sure the project you pick is achievable. I over aimed and took me a bit longer to finish.

But building a complete solution for a website is not an easy task. It takes a lot of planning and knowledge to complete it.

It's win win, there is almost always some form of old software that needs updating, new features, or just needs to be completely new, and many educational institutions will jump at "free" work.

And since it's only your BSc just do the easiest project that's not boring and get it out of the way.

Build the cool stuff later. A few years from now no one will care about your GPA, let alone your final year project.

I'd wager that this - the notion that school is for a degree, abstract from challenging oneself to learn anything is a healthy contributor the apparent glut of 'uderemployed' graduates.

>A few years from now no one will care about your GPA, let alone your final year project.

Perhaps, but they'll certainly have more to gain from someone who cares about doing quality work and is willing to challenge themselves.

Further, it's not an entirely safe assumption that you'll even be capable doing 'the cool stuff later', particularly without having tried.

But to the other posters merit, if you can't narrow down what it is you want to do, then pick a "boring" thing -- it's better than nothing at all.

Currently I control plenty of lights at home that are LED by using a big transistor and an arduino connected to a server running a java server program.

I would recommend doing something simple like gluing a servo to a switch to begin with.

For facial recognition, go with something off the shelf to get things up and running. And if you want to expand the scope, try to write your own simple engine instead. https://www.openshift.com/blogs/day-12-opencv-face-detection...

So what did I do? I re-implemented Git in PHP (read-only). It was, to put it mildly, difficult, and stressful, but I actually managed to pull it off (mostly).

I didn't just choose at random, obviously. I wanted to add file version support to an open-source project, and after some basic research, settled on Git. The catch was that the open-source project ran in a pure-PHP environment (no modules beyond those commonly found on shared hosting). So I had to find a way of reading Git repositories in PHP without resorting to exec() etc. Hence, read-only Git in pure PHP. Throw in WebDAV or SSH and you can actually push / pull to those repositories with front-end clients like SparkleShare, which was a good candidate for future work.

I nearly went crazy, of course. I had little-to-no understanding of DVCS concepts, graphs, and so on (big O analysis is still difficult to be honest). However, by writing the project, I got much more direct experience of graph theory than I ever would studying a text book. This has turned out to be incredibly useful in my day-job as a developer.

The take-away I'm trying to get to is: pick something completely (or slightly) unrelated to computer science concepts like big data, AI, etc. and find something you're interested in. Then ask the question "How do I apply X to this?".

(These examples are purely off the top of my head, and may actually be ridiculous in practice. YMMV)

"How can I use big data techniques to analyse my web server's access logs?" "How can I use AI/Machine Learning to detect shellshock attacks on my server?" "How can I use computer vision techniques to render a map of the local area using drones?" "How can I use big data, AI, machine learning, and computer vision techniques to analyse the proportion of cat pictures and videos posted to social media?"

What I want to re-iterate though is that I started with "I want to add file versioning support to this software" and ended up discussing graph theory, diffs, patches, open-source etiquette posts by ESR, big-endian and little-endian integers (Git uses both in it's file formats), binary fanout tables, the SHA-1 algorithm, content-addressable filesystems, and all sorts of other crazy stuff I hadn't even anticipated when I started.

My supervisor liked it - I wanted to sleep for a month straight.

Check, check, and check.

mobman.bitbucket.org

if (isPHP)

  echo "VULNERABLE!"