Mon Sep 1 18:06:10 EDT 2025
There are many individuals and groups on or near campus who have really interesting problems that could be profitably attacked by folks in COS 333. Here are some of them. They have come from a variety of sources on campus.
If you're interested in working on one of the proposed projects, then you should contact the proposing organization directly. Typically the organization will agree to work with the first project team that makes contact, so it's important that you make contact soon.
The first two proposals are new this semester. The lead instructor has vetted those projects. The others are hold-overs from previous semesters but still of interest. The lead instructor has not vetted those projects.
Contact
Oleg Golev (ogolev@alumni.princeton.edu), Head of Product at Sentient (https://sentient.xyz/) and Contributor to Sentient Foundation (https://sentient.foundation/)
Dondero notes:
Summary
Your own up-to-date portal to sports (football, soccer, cricket, basketball, baseball, or others), allowing you to view upcoming games, review game-related bets and discussions, view player profiles, follow big events like March Madness, and more!
Minimum Viable Product
Stretch Goals (non-AI)
Stretch Goals (AI)
Contact
Jonathan Pillow (pillow@princeton.edu), Professor in Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) and Center for Statistics & Machine Learning (CSML)
Background
At Princeton, many popular courses quickly reach enrollment capacity during the course selection period. That certainly is true in the Princeton Neurosciences Institute (PNI). Currently, there is no centralized system for managing waitlists, and students who are unable to enroll often rely on ad-hoc methods such as emailing professors or departmental administrators. This leads to inefficiency, uncertainty, and extra administrative burden.
This project proposes the development of a web application that integrates with the Princeton Registrar’s course enrollment data, providing a clear and automated mechanism for PNI students to join waitlists for PNI course and be notified when a seat becomes available.
Minimum Viable Product
A web application that allows PNI students to sign up for a waitlist for PNI courses. Key functionality includes:
Stretch Goals
Samuel S. Wang, Professor of Molecular Biology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute
See a description of the Princeton Gerrymandering Project.
Stephen Kim, Associate Director for Information and Technology The Princeton University Art Museum offers a world-class collection of over 100,000 works of art spanning the world of art from antiquity to the present. While more than 200,000 visitors visit our galleries in a year, we are always eager to develop new ways to engage audiences, especially, YOU, our students. Recently, we've built out new data and images services to power potential innovations like:
Sam Wang, Neuroscience Every 10 years, legislative districts across America must be redrawn after the Census. Redistricters have the task of making sure that diverse communities within a state are fairly represented. But they do not always know where those communities are.
Citizens have opportunities to testify about their communities in public hearings. But that testimony is qualitative, and there is no way to integrate the comments in a unified way. It would be useful to have a graphical application for individuals to (a) draw their communities of interest (COI's) on a state map, (b) store the shapes in a standard format such as GIS, and (c) annotate the shapes with comments. Then, after citizens have participated, it would be useful to display all of the communities of interest in a single map for inspection.
An additional feature might be reduction of redundancy by combining highly overlapping communities in a single consensus graphical display object.
Abby Klionsky '14, Office of the Executive Vice President The decor in Frist -- all the quotes painted on the wall, etc. -- is meant to represent a diversity of ideas, and is one of the places on campus that, theoretically, does this quite well. It's theoretical because we don't know how much people actually pay attention to them, nor whether they know anything about the person being quoted.
There is actually documentation of all of this, in a very old-school, circa-2000 website that pairs photos of the quotes with photos and bios and explanations of the people who they are quoting: http://princeton.edu/frist/iconography.
This also covers the images in Cafe Viv and some of the Princeton-y flotsam that adorns the halls and walls. It would be GREAT if this could actually be a site that made people interested in looking at it!
Could we build a system that showed these images much more dynamically, perhaps with a rotating sequence of pictures that always showed something interesting. For each one, perhaps there could be a QR code that pointed to more details. Or maybe a touch screen would make it easy to get more details. Would it be possible to add new images and new text very easily without having to be an expert? Are there other things that would make the displays more appealing and encourage people to look at them more carefully?
Jill Stockwell, McGraw Center Ideas that would greatly improve our organization's efficiency and communication. One is a volunteer application management system for our 150+ applicants each semester; another is a carpooling application for each of the seven facilities where we teach.
Wangyal Shawa, Map and Geospatial Information Center
We are planning two projects to create and manage our scanned maps and create geospatial data. One project is related to creating a batch georeferencing tool that will georeference scanned topographic maps that are the same size and the same scale. There is one system called QUAD-G (open source) to process the United States Geological Survey 1:24,000 scale maps but this software does not work well if you have a smaller scale map series. We need to customize the QUAD-G software to work with smaller scale maps using the same programming language or redesign it with a different programming language using similar workflows.
Another project is to design an open source software system that will extract georeferenced scanned maps to vector geospatial data.
These projects will benefit many researchers and libraries.
Ijeoma D. Nwagwu (ijeoma.nwagwu@princeton.edu), Office of Sustainability
The Office of Sustainability's Campus as Lab (CAL) program facilitates the use of Princeton's campus for sustainability research and experiential learning to advance the Sustainability Action Plan. Explorations into the social, physical, and operational dimensions of Princeton can generate new knowledge to help advance sustainability on campus, in our broader community, and around the world. Over the years COS 333 students have worked on several CAL projects and can support the Office of Sustainability on campus-based projects by developing:
Jed Marsh, Vice Provost for Institutional Research
There is an increasing interest in student outcomes after the initial
placement -- say 10 years post degree. Currently, these data are
harvested from a hodge-podge of sources, including scraping sites like
LinkedIn. There's a fair amount of staff time spent across
campus googling former students, both graduates and undergrads.
We need tools that:
(1) improve data collection from the web. Could there be an API from
LinkedIn or job search sites?
Could one develop an app to systematically search for and harvest CV's &
resumes posted by Princeton Alumni?
(2) Categorize unstructured employment data (job code, employer, etc.,)
into standardized occupation (SOC) and industry (NACIS) codes.
(3) Store these data in a common repository that could be available for
student outcome studies.
Abby Klionsky '14, Office of the Executive Vice President As a breakout group of the Campus Iconography Committee, the Princeton History Working Group is building a series of themed historical tours of Princeton's campus that will highlight lesser-known histories of the university. These will take shape in the form of a mobile app, which will use wayfinding technology to guide users to sites across campus and showcase associated photos, audio, and video to tell these stories. For some of these sites, we'd like to incorporate augmented reality features -- particularly in places where there may no longer be a physical marker or building still standing. The augmented reality component we're envisioning would likely be a statue for "placement" in one of the statue-hold pedestals in East Pyne courtyard or the front of Frist, a moving image to launch over a picture frame or screen that does exist in reality, or overlaying an old image of a campus map/building over what exists today.