A couple of smaller projects:
1) A couple people have requested a system to schedule an automatic reboot. This should be added to the System/Reboot page, and let people schedule a time when the system will automatically go down for reboot. This can be implemented relatively simply by adding a line to the /etc/crontabs/root file.
2) Right now I'm only using the layer7 iptables filters that ship with OpenWrt. I'd like a package that adds some more/updates these filters. Also, I'd like to update some of the javascript so that there is a function in the common.js library where I can send it a list of all files in /etc/l7-protocols, and it will translate the ones it recognizes to a list of names (with proper spacing/capitalization), and just drops the .pat extension from the one it doesn't know. It should return a two-dimensional array. l7names[0] should be a list of the names without the .pat extension which are the protocol ids iptables will accept. l7names[1] l7names[1] should be the human-readable names with proper spacing/capitalization. Then, wherever there is a select element for l7 filters it should be populated using this function. The files in the l7-protocols directory can be loaded in the haserl shell script at the top of the relevant pages. This way, any time you add an L7 filter it automatically appears wherever it should, instead of having to change stuff in a bunch of places.
3) This is one I'm going to do soon anyway (it has relatively high priority), but it's probably the simplest of the three: In the Quotas section, update the validateQuota function so instead of testing whether there is any other quota for a given ip it checks whether there is any other quota for the same ip that has an overlapping time frame. That way, two quotas can be specified for the same IP so long as the times that they apply do not overlap.
Are you writing a Masters or PhD thesis? If you're writing your PhD thesis right now, you are, in at least one respect, ahead of me

In either case, good luck! I'm curious: what are you studying and what is your thesis topic?