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COS 126/226 Course Development

Computer Science Dept., Princeton University

We run a summer program for students to work on individual or group projects that have the potential to evolve into course materials for COS 126/226. We seek talented students in all fields, not just potential CS majors. Non-CS majors not only bring knowledge in their field that we might not have to the table, but also can help us decide what we can add to the course that could make it more valuable to students in their departments.

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.

Develop infrastucture for grading assignments in 126, 226, and 402.
Algorithmic demos/movies for COS 126/226 lectures.
3D graphics / wireframe.
Any interesting science and engineering assignments.
Interactive graphics for scientific visualizations.
Artificial intelligence assignment (students programs competing against each other in some game).
Text mining and topic analysis of The Congressional Record.
Database processing (data.gov; freedb for music; TIGER/Line for geographic information systems; Sloan Digital Sky survey for a map of a large part of the universe); DBLP for computer science bibliographies.
Web graphs from Laboratory for Web Algorithmics or Stanford WebBase project.
Analyze large scale datasets from the Machine Learning Repository, for clustering, topic modeling, document classification and other machine learning tasks.
Analyze social networks from UC Irvine Network Data Repository.
Image stitching assignment (Dijkstra's shortest path application).
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 (though you do need to be on campus while working). 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 through MacMillan. Also, we expect you to be able to attend weekly meetings. The application deadline is April 8, 2011. We'll make admission decisions a week or so of this deadline.

Bob Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne