[Princeton logo]

COS 126/226 Course Development

Computer Science Dept., Princeton University

We have some support for people to work on individual or group projects that have the potential to evolve into course materials for COS 126/226 here in the CS department, primarily during the summer. We are looking for talented students in all fields, not just potential CS majors. If you are not a CS major, you not only bring knowledge in your field that we might not have to the table, but also you can help us decide what we can add to the course that could make it more valuable to students in your department.

There are a huge number of potential tasks for people to take on; our preference is for everyone to work on things close to their level of expertise and interest, so the "job description" will be tailored accordingly. To give you an idea of what we have in mind, here is a list of some ideas, though we expect that people will bring their own ideas into the process. In fact, some of our most successful projects in the past have been student-generated, so do not feel limited by this list of ideas. If you have some idea that you think might be appealing to future generations of Princeton students, this is your chance to explore it.

3D graphics / wireframe
Ajax applications (using Google Web Toolkit or Apollo)
any interesting engineering assignments
distributed computing lecture
interactive graphics for scientific visualizations
artificial intelligence assignment (students programs competing against each other in some game)
support for interactive exercises
Computing approximate Nash equilibria using multiplicative weights
ecological/biological systems simulation
text mining and topic analysis of The Congressional Record
text-to-speech synthesis
database processing (freedb for music, IMDB for movies, TIGER/Line for geographic information systems, Sloan Digital Sky survey for a map of a large part of the universe)
collecting and processing huge graphs from real applications
Barcodepedia
Turing's reaction-diffusion model

There are no preconceived expectations about which projects will ultimately "work out" and be adopted into the curriculum and which ones will be chalked up to an interesting learning experience; indeed, the latter is as important as the former. Your goal in this job would be to pursue something related to the courses that you want to learn more about, while at the same time holding on to the potential of producing something that may be of value to future students.

If you've survived the courses, you're probably qualified for the work. If you are interested in being involved in this project this summer, please complete the web application. We'll then work out the details with the interested parties.

The program runs from June to August, but the dates are quite flexible, and you need not work continuously or for the entire period. You will be paid on a hourly basis, up to 40 hours per week. Housing is not included, although you can apply for Princeton summer housing (approx $100 per week) through MacMillan. Also, we expect you to be able to attend weekly meetings (lunch provided). The application deadline is April 16, 2007. We'll make admission decisions within a week or so of this deadline.

Bob Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne