The subject of artificial Intelligence and many interesting domains are available. Speech recognition, self-driving cars, biped walking robots and cognitive architectures are only a few example. Especially for beginners in the domain it's important to know which kind of domains can be ignored, because they are too complicated and not understood quite well. This allows to focus on the remaining problems which are located within artificial intelligence and can be solved with success.
One example for an easy to automate task is a metro monitoring device. That's an onboard computer who creates a logfile for a metro or a subway in a city. This kind of task contains of many different assumptions. The first one is, that "Automatic train operation" domains are much easier to formalize than self-driving cars or biped robots on an unexplored island. The train network in a city, is fixed, well known and won't change in the next 20 years. Additionally, there are no obstacles and everything is defined by rules. Secondly, instead of programming a software which can operate the train automatically, it's much easier to monitor a human operator who is doing the task. That means, the software is doing nothing, but has the only task to observe the human.
From a technical point of view, the realtime task is about recording existing raw data in a machine readable format. In each second the subway has a speed value, a position and a status, for example the doors can be closed or open. The overall situation can be monitored similar to the EEG of a human body. The next step is to parse the data stream and convert the information into semantic information. For example, to detect if the train is fulfilling the plan, if an emergency is there and so on.
The most interesting aspect of this task is, that the technical side isn't too advanced and at the same time it's a useful application. That means, the real subway will profit from the project. Such a black box is calle Train event recorder.
Rush hour
From a mechanical side, a subway train is not very interesting. The technology was invented decades ago and is sold out-of-the box. What makes subway trains interesting is a special use case, called rush hour. In the morning and in the evening lots of people are crowed at the platform. They are waiting for the incoming train, and they are leaving the train, if they have arrived.
The problem is not located in the train itself, but it has to do with capacity. The number of people who are requesting a service is higher, than the free stand places in the subway, as a result there is a traffic jam. The commuter are loosing their spare time and have to wait together with random strangers until a random train comes in. Most people at the station doesn't know the technical details of the subway. They are not aware of how much electricity the subway needs, if the system is older or newer or what the maximum speed is. The thing they are asking for is, why they have to wait. Why it takes so long and why so many people are driving at the same time with the same train.