How to pick a project / what ML can do?

I am doing an intro course on machine learning and we have to select a project, do some research, come up with results, and write a report. Fairly basic for a graduate course. The problem is that I am new to ML so I am having a hard time picking something.

Two ideas I have in my head are:

There's weight lifting website a few buddies are working on to help users track their workouts and to analyze it and help them improve. At this moment it is in closed beta and soon it will go to an open beta. They are willing to share the data as it would probably be beneficial with them that I share the results. As users are using it it is building up a lot of data in terms of what exercises people are doing, their reps, sets, weights, and warmup/working sets. But I am not sure what I can do with machine learning with this data.

The other project is sports. I have a lot of access to advanced stats on hockey players in the NHL. But again I am not sure what I can do with this data.

So how do you figure out what you want to do with data? How can you figure out what you can do with the data?

Thanks