Other Topics

If you're having difficulty thinking of a good topic take a look at the list below for ideas. You're also welcome to look at the extra topics that your fellow students have put on their blogs.

Ideas

  1. Keeping user/company data private and secure. Recent hacks (i.e. Equifax, Sony) prove that companies still aren't getting it right. What should they be doing?
  2. How can a small business launch their own online store? Small businesses don't have big budgets and can't pay to have their own website built from scratch. What are their options? Could look at joining existing retail sites (Amazon, Alibaba, ...) or using a low-cost or free e-commerce suite (i.e. Magento). Could build a demo site. Some of these options are quite easy, but this is deceptive. There are many issues that most people don't understand. It may "work" but it might just be an illusion. Many issues: data privacy and legal issues, security, dependencies, future locked-in costs, ...
  3. Data analytics, data science, business intelligence. Lot's of projects involving learning to do some analytics with real data. Should do it with a business purpose in mind. IBM Watson, Cognos, Tableau, ... What are the issues with these? Doing data analysis with Tableau can be easy, but what do the results mean and can they be trusted? What does it take to do it right?
  4. Targeted advertising: how it works, how it's used, connection with Big Data. Lots of issues here.
  5. Machine Learning / Deep Learning / AI / Intelligent Systems. Lot's of topics here. A good plan here is to learn what companies are doing now, learn how it works and what it takes, then figure out where it is likely to go in the future.
  6. Blockchains, not just for crypto-currencies anymore. The blockchain as a technology has gone mainstream. Learn how it works and how it will be used in the future. What are the issues?
  7. Data privacy laws: compare the US, or China, or ? with the new EU General Data Protection Regulation. Compare and contrast, from the perspective of citizens or businesses.
  8. From the Azure AI webinar from 10/4 (Building AI Applications with the Power of the Cloud): Proposal for a new business or service using AI in the cloud to do something. Key AI tasks are things like: recognizing object in images/video, anomaly detection, speech/language recognition, translation, ...
  9. Business or market analysis where IT plays a significant role. There are many businesses that depend heavily on data or IT systems. Analyze them and identify issues, weaknesses, ...
  10. More technically minded? Choose a particular technology and investigate it. Start with a summary of what it does and what problems it solves. Who is it for? Why do they use it? Then try to identify issues: technical, organizational, market, governmental, ...? Work on those issues to explain them to a non-technical reader. Then, what does the future hold?
  11. ? I'll put more here as I think them up.