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 three proposals are new this semester. They're listed in the order received. To some extent the lead instructor has vetted those projects; but you should make sure that they're right for the course and for you. The others are hold-overs from previous semesters but still of interest. The lead instructor has not vetted those projects.
Contact
Alkin Kaz, GCHC President & GSG Assembly Representative for COS (akaz@princeton.edu)
A Graduate Student Hub that hosts all of the information related to Princeton graduate student social events in a centralized platform.
MVP Requirements
Princeton graduate students can browse social events in a calendar format, see event descriptions, links to RSVP, and filter for events organized by a specific org (e.g. GCHC or GSG) or in a specific location (e.g. Graduate College, Lawrence, Lakeside, Meadows).
Officers of graduate student organizations can register their org on this app and list their committee members. They can then organize social events and post them for the general student body to see. Officers can allocate a budget to each event, create a list of tasks for the organizers, and track their planning process in one centralized platform.
Stretch Goals
Contacts
Primary:
Additional:
Organization Description
Established in 1967, NJ Rise has been working with the local community to meet the needs of their neighbors, or clients, in the East Windsor and Hightstown areas. Rise offers programs enabling participating individuals and families to "overcome obstacles and achieve their full potential by providing them with services and facilitating community partnerships." No one seeking help, especially food, is ever turned away. Case managers at the Rise Home Office connect neighbors to resources such as food, healthcare, legal advising, translation services, and emergency assistance. There are a total of 82 services Rise provides, including: the Rise Pantry with food and other household necessities; Community Dinners 3 times a week in 3 locations; Rise Thrift, which offers an array of pre-loved clothes and more; and uRise which provides the Rise community with online content, classes (like English Language Learning) and one-on-one connections to empower users with new skills to help manage their wellbeing. As Rise operates different programs in several locations, managing data securely and keeping information up to date is crucial.
Minimum Viable Product
A responsive web-app that allows administrators to analyze data across (many of if not all) of Rise’s services and generate reports. The app should allow Rise to do business analyses to see trends and make strategic decisions.
Rise has a pantry software system that they also adapted for use as a case management system. The CSV reporting tools available do not meet the organization's needs. Some reporting needs are managed with exporting a file and using Excel formulas, which could be automated with a new app. Some of the data must be refreshed daily. If you and your classmates take on Rise's project, you would get anonymized data in addition to seven years' worth of normalized historical data. The historical data will be helpful in making forecasts about food ordering and distribution.
User Groups
Administrators (authenticated users - senior Rise staff)
Members (authenticated users - Rise staff)
Stretch goals
Contact
Vinay Ramesh '20 (vramesh@alumni.princeton.edu)
Dondero note: Vinay is a Princeton and COS 333 alumnus who works in industry as an AI software engineer.
The Pitch
Most COS 333 students who build "an AI chatbot" end up with a demo that works for one use case and can't be reused. This project teaches the difference: build a chat platform that other applications can build on, not just a chatbot.
Why This Project Matters
Every company is adding AI to their products, but they're not hiring researchers — they're hiring engineers who can build production systems around LLMs. That's exactly what this project teaches.
Students walk away with:
"I built a reusable RAG platform" is a strong answer in any AI-related interview right now.
MVP
A working chatbot for one knowledge base (e.g., Princeton course catalog, department FAQ):
This alone is a solid project, but the chatbot undesirably may be tightly coupled to its data source.
Stretch Goals
Separate three concerns:
Demonstrate extensibility with a second client or data source. Document how a future team could plug in a different corpus without rewriting the engine.
Why This Works for COS 333
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.