BRIEFLY: I am quite interested in ‘sound shifts’ that apparently systematically relate languages which have common ancestry and there are possibilities to implement tools to assist in the presentation/verification of data that scholars have over the years assembled to attest to these sound shifts
AT GREATER LENGTH:
Sometime during the 19th century it was observed that certain sound correspondences seem to recur when comparing words of similar meaning from (old) Greek and Germanic eg.
p~f (pyr/fyr ‘fire’), k~h (kardia/herta ‘heart’), d~t (duo/twa), th~d (thura/dura ‘door’)
and it was later proposed to explain this by supposing the words to have descended via sound changes from a common origin in an ancestor language eg.
Orig->Greek p->p,k->k,d->d, dh->th, Orig->Germ p->f,k->h,d->t,dh->d
with such words with a conjectured common ancestor coming to be called ‘cognates‘.
Today modern English is thought to be a ‘descendant’ language of a Germanic ancestor language, which in its turn is one descendant amongst many others (Greek, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit) of a single ancestor Proto-Indo-European language.
The aim of the project is put (some of) the intricate and extensive scholarly work concerning these ‘Indo-European’ sound shifts (eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_sound_laws) on a computational footing.
One possible use-case would be to implement tools to assist a newcomer to the area when reading through a list of claimed cognates words across a range of languages to have a computer program make plain which parts are instantiating the canonical assumptions and which are not, eg.
kardia ~ heorta k~h, d~t
Other possibilities might involve cognate discovery and discovery of statistical patterns in the system of sound shifts.