Wed Feb 27 14:17:44 EST 2013
Newer item(s) are at the front.
Social Scientists still don't understand why teens start having sex
when they do. To reach teens and get them to tell us their stories from
their point of view, we want to develop a mobile diary so they can tell
us about their romantic relationships and their social lives. Using
mobile apps for data collection is new to sociology, and the first
results are already changing the social sciences.
This will require a mobile app, since phones are the primary form of
web and social access for teens. Privacy and encryption matter; the
sensitive community and topic requires high quality end-to-end
security. Front end development is needed both for making teen users
feel comfortable on the system, and for presenting the data to social
scientists for them to analyze. How do we code, query, access, and
visualize this data? We need a modular design because we don't want a
one-off. Can you write a platform that can be modified or extended to
other projects? We're looking for a fully-functional system in a real world
setting.
1. A system to report maintenance related issues on campus at time of
observation. A quick example would be that if you see a lightbulb out,
you would snap a photo of it with your phone, add some location
information, put the info in a database and then alert a technician.
This could also used to report printer malfunctions, cluster problems,
etc.
2. A recommender system to help students navigate the information and
service infrastructure of campus. This gets at the problem that
"There are so many resources here for students, and the organization of
the information is so poor, that students don't know what they could be
doing." This is a particular problem for OIT in that we offer lots of
tools and technologies for students but can't seem to communicate
particularly well about them. However, some students do manage to
figure it out and their expertise could be very useful to others. How
do you capture what the experts know about campus and make it available
(in a time-relevant manner) to other students?
Get a tour of Princeton's campus using "augmented reality" on your
Android/iPhone, including both current geolocated live tweets and
historic images and names associated with locations, buildings, and
sculpture that you see through your mobile phone's camera while
wandering the campus.
How?
Using augmented reality for mobile devices,
add a Princeton University layer in the
Android/iOS augmented reality application Layar, to see two kinds of
things: 1) tweets using the #PrincetonUniversity hashtag (if the tweets
are geolocated so they can be nailed to a point) and 2) points of
interest from a shared Google Map.
Mash up the existing
Locations and Places Web Services
with Library Special Collections resources
(i.e., such as the
Princeton University Historic Postcard Collection)
to provide some historic context, images, and name associations.
The Library can work with students to add location data to the existing
Digital Library Web Service.
Some of these might suggest ideas for projects, perhaps phone
apps, that might combine multiple sources of campus data.
We want to search one text (A) with a set of other texts (B & C),
find places in A that are identical or similar to B or C, tag them
accordingly, and have a way to link back accurately to exactly where in
B or C the relevant text portion is from. Historians would like to be
able to do this to identify previously unrecognized instances of
plagiarism or, more-often, "self-plagiarism," in which an author has
lifted text from previous things she's written (from letters to
articles) and re-used them in a later text. Such a search/visualization
tool would be of general interest to intellectual historians, especially
those dealing with authors/thinkers who have limited corpora, were known
to plagiarize themselves, and do so in complex or otherwise
misunderstood ways.
Such a project would have two parts: a search algorithm and a
visualizer (like a PDF viewer). The former should be able to match
strings (not line-based, but sentence-based), and it would be great if
there were ways to avoid false negatives especially (e.g., an author
might blank out a name in an example paragraph, such that exact strings
wouldn't match but the paragraph is still lifted and we'd like to pick
that up). The visualizer is almost more important: something clean,
into which digital texts could be loaded in a straightforward way and
out of which "results" (i.e., highlighted text, with scrollover
revelations of original provenance in B and C, listed in a menu bar).
Marvin is also interested in data analysis and visualization tools for
a variety of library systems, in effect a dashboard for the library.
How about a Thunderbird extension that allows me to right-click on an
attachment and decide if I want to save it in a place that I choose or in a
folder that corresponds to an email folder structurally, but is on my hard
drive? Or, a way to save a message in an email folder, but that gives me the
option of where to put the attachment - in the email folder or on my local
drive, but with a 'stub' of some sort being kept with the message so it can
retrieve the attachment from disk when I view the message.
(1) automatically populate with all significant university deadlines
(add/drop, pdf, mid-terms, dean's date, deadlines for declaring a major,
JP, etc). For some of these events, there could be an estimation
of how far in advance you need to prepare for the event so you can see a
bar indicating when you should begin planning -- for example 72 hours
before add/drop so you have time to schedule a meeting with your
professor or adviser to get an update on your status in the course, a
month prior for JP deadline to make sure you have a working draft,
etc.). User could add, sync, or import additional events from other
calendars. If a student selects a particular major the calendar could
populate with a list of departmental requirements that could be dropped
into the calendar in the appropriate term -- using features of ICE
perhaps? Courses that have prerequisites would prompt users for those
courses when they are dropped into the calendar.
(2) a feature that ranks or tags calendar events with relative
importance to you and what type of goal it is connected with -- for
example: thesis would be tied to the "graduate from Princeton" goal so
it would be ranked high, while attending TH night arch sing could be
given relatively low importance and tied to "relaxation".
(3) zoom feature allowing users to see a week, month, term, year, or
all four years at Princeton in a single view. Events that are ranked
high in importance (for example finish thesis with a 6 month block of
time) would be visible event from the highest level while events ranked
lower would only be visible when viewed at a higher resolution. This
would help students to think about how they spend their time as it
relates to their goals by seeing long term goals and deadlines from
different perspectives.
Princeton, the New York public library, and Columbia run a joint
off-site storage facility on the Forrestal campus named "RECAP." One of
our longterm dreams is to do something called "de-duping," meaning
"de-duplicating," meaning storing only 1 copy of a particular volume
rather than 2 or 3 (one from Princeton, one from NYPL, and one from
Columbia). There are many obstacles to this dream, some of which are
legal (e.g., if there's one copy, who owns it?).
But one of the obstacles is technical. To de-dupe, we would have to
identify the duplicates (preferably before they entered RECAP). This
can be tricky for at least two reasons. One is that, given the purposes
of the research libraries, it will matter (at least sometimes) whether
the duplicates are exact or not: the 2nd edition and the 4th edition are
not perfect substitutes for one another. The second is that Princeton,
NYPL, and Columbia all run differently configured online catalogs, so it
becomes a clunky, manual process to compare records.
This should be solvable by a Kayak-like program: if one app can
search a bunch of airline websites, why not an app that combs multiple
library databases?
Help the COS Lab TAs, Alex Daifotis (daifotis@princeton.edu)
With the rise in enrollment, the COS Lab TAs have really been stretched to
continue providing the help they always have. One problem of particular
note, is that we are pretty technologically backward in terms of assigning
people to shifts, getting feedback from students, and making sure people
are being helped ASAP. Right now our entire system is basically email the
list for shift switches, and write names on a blackboard as people need
help. Help us do better than this! We're open to people making the project
into their own vision, but broadly speaking -- we are looking for a way of
tracking people (students and TAs) in the lab more efficiently, and keeping
track of relevant stats (i.e. how many people are helped in a given night,
what assignments were they doing, etc.) Contact Alex Daifotis for more information.
Teen Sex Diaries: Revolutionizing the Social Sciences,
Janet Vertesi and Marta Tienda (jvertesi, tienda@princeton.edu), Sociology
OIT infrastructure and maintenance reporting systems,
Jay Dominick (jdominick@princeton.edu), OIT
Helping individual political activism, Sam Wang (sswang@princeton.edu),
Princeton Election Consortium
Create an app that would be a
finder to locate the nearest nearby Congressional district that is easily
swayable by individual activism, i.e., get-out-the-vote (GOTV) activity.
Input: ZIP code, most recent election outcomes, Congressional/national polls
if available to calculate an offset from the recent election outcomes.
Output: Congressional districts within 3 hours' drive where GOTV is most
likely to sway a race, i.e., where the race is within 5, 10, or 15 points,
depending on how aggressive you want to be.
Ideally it would be in a condition to be updated by the authors or by
someone else for the next election. It has the potential to be very useful.
Princeton Prosody Archive, Grant Wythoff (gwythoff@princeton.edu)
and Meredith Martin (mm4@princeton.edu), English
The Princeton Prosody Archive, a collection of historical texts on poetry
and poetics, is looking for a redesigned interface. The Archive offers a
range of historical documents, including manuscripts, manuals, articles,
grammar books, and other materials all pertaining to the rhythm,
intonation, and measure of language. Not a static repository of
historical data, the Princeton Prosody Archive engages scholars to
re-think the past and future of navigating, conceptualizing, and
historicizing large amounts of data in a format that will be useful for
scholars who work with many kinds of digital-text archives. The archive needs a
search portal for the full text of 3,000 books, and a browser for the
original page images of these books. Also possible will be a collaboration
with Princeton computer science researchers on building graphical
interfaces to topic models derived from these texts on poetics.
Virtual Campus Tour: Past and Present, Shaun Ellis (shaune@princeton.edu), Library
OIT Data Feeds, Sal Rosario (srosario@princeton.edu), OIT
OIT has recently made available a number of
interesting data feeds.
From 2012:
Analysis and Visualization of Text Influences,
Henry Cowles (hcowles@princeton.edu), History
Library dashboard(s), Kevin Reiss (kr2@princeton.edu), Library
The dashboard/visualization project I had in mind would have three components:
If this is too expansive a project for the course we definitely
could focus on just points one and two above.
Digitization of materials, Marvin Bielawski (marvinb@princeton.edu), Library
Is there a way we could get full-text transcriptions of some of the
handwritten manuscripts in the digital collections? It would be great
to develop some tools that would allow us to "crowd source" this kind of
thing. For example, imagine a competitive game among alumni to see
which class could transcribe the most Trustees Minutes. From my
experience in the Office of Development, they love that type of healthy
competition among classes to see who can help out Princeton more.
Here's an example of a great game-like interface for crowd sourcing ship logs
for better climate change data:
http://www.oldweather.org
and
here's an in-depth explanation.
Mail interfaces, Randee Tengi (rit@princeton.edu), Psychology
Like many people, I just treat my email like a filing cabinet, making levels of
nested folders, saving emails with attachments, while often the attachment is
all I need, and filling up email disk quota. But if I file it on my hard drive,
I often can't find it again. I just find it much easier to find things in email
folders than on disk, in large part because the directory/folder structures
don't match. I am not sure exactly what I'm getting at, but I would love some
way to make my email folder structure automatically map to a corresponding
folder on my hard drive so that I could either store the email in an email
folder, but the attachment in a disk file so it's not chewing up mail quota. Or
maybe a way to "link" and email (Exchange) folder to a folder on disk so that
if I file the mail in an email folder, I could, at a click, save the attachment
someone on disk where I can easily find it, and remove it from the email.
College wise calendar, Patrick Caddeau (caddeau@Princeton.edu), Forbes College
The idea is to help students to sync up how they spend their time
with their academic goals, important deadlines, and milestones in the
progress from freshman to senior, and beyond. Many students struggle
with how to wisely allocate their time and find management of their time
to be a major source of stress. A college wise calendar would provide a
map that connects how students spend time with accomplishing major
goals. It would have three main features:
De-duping RECAP, Marvin Bielawski (marvinb@Princeton.edu), Library