Programming

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

I am unfamiliar with your school system I think. Final year of college / university? Do you have a specialization in your major (graphics, machine learning, embedded, networks / security - something like this?)

I'd go with something from the specialization if you have one. If not, just something that interests you.

An LLM pointed at various (local) public sources of data, that can answer (local) voter questions, could be pretty cool.

I.e: "Summarize X candidate's voting record on tax increases/education/walkable cities/unionization/etc....

I don’t think you should do LLM or machine learning stuff if you want to get software development out of the project. Mostly because most of the time you won’t do software dev stuff with that kind of stuff. You will mostly just download some off the shelf model, prepare data, tweak parameters, cross your fingers and pray for slightly better results, and repeat.

My recommendation without knowing much about you is to make a game engine. You remove the pressure of making something practical, and can just focus on making stuff that looks cool. You can easily control the scope of the project, and you will face a great variety of software development challenges. Lots of opportunities to learn.

And finally you will also have something that’s fun to present.

LLMs are all the hype but there are plenty of solid computer science projects. Some options that come to mind:

1. Your own DB engine
2. Your own game engine (you can put a cool twist on it - I had a thought of making a game in non-euclidean 3D space)
3. Your own client/server Etc...

A more general option is to look for free APIs and use that is base for ideas.

What topics do you find interesting?

Ask your profs or other applicable personnel for offered final year projects, suggestions, and previous years projects. You can also check software dev companies which may offer such projects as job openings. That'll give you more of an overview of current common projects, and some ideas of what you could do.

I might misunderstand what you mean with "implementing" an LLM, but unless you have a good understanding of deep learning and math I wouldn't recommend to implement one from scratch. There's a lot of complex math involved in these kind of topics. If you mean implementing an application around an existing LLM, for example writing a chat website that interfaces with ChatGPT or a local LLM, then it's doable (depending on you current skills).