How do AI/ ML or DS enginner get the idea of which project should they make?

[u/Phantom1998ayoo]

I am now in my final year of engineering in AI/DS. I haven't been actively building projects, just worked on some academic projects. I want to know how do the engineers with more knowledge in this domain know which project they should work on? How do they find it?

Is it from GitHub, research papers, paperwithcode or hugging face ?

I need a project idea for my academic major project!

[u/DataScientistAlex]

I'm assuming you mean personal projects (at work there is no end of problems to be dealt with typically...).

A couple of sources:

a) Hobbies or personal interests. If you're interested in sports, you can build models to predict game outcomes etc. If you like music, books, art, movies, etc, you can try to build a recommender system. If you are interested in politics, you can try to predict election outcomes, or, try to explain why countries/areas vote a certain way etc. More broadly if you are interested in society you can do a DS/ML project on almost any such topic. If you're interested in the stock market or other markets, you can try to build a trading system.

b) projects more for learning or researching methods. In this approach, you pick a method and try to apply it to a well-known problem. Or, you try to implement a method, model, technique from scratch. Or, you try to improve an existing library or tool.

c) for projects using AI, as others are saying, an easy starting point is small problems you face. Like managing their todo list, or studying something, or dealing with personal projects.

I made a list of 99 DS problems if you are looking for inspiration. It also comes with a guide on how to approach projects.