Wed Feb 26 20:02:31 EST 2014
Newer item(s) are at the front.
A. One project could be to expose all of the data collected by TigerEnergy since launch in May 2013 to the students and for them to enhance the visualization of current and historical data. If the student projects are promising, they could potentially be integrated into the TigerEnergy experience permanently.
B. Another possibility with TigerEnergy could be associated with a new project to visualize live dorm energy-use. The idea is to take live dorm data (currently 16 meters) and create an interactive mobile-friendly map that color codes buildings by their current level of energy use. This would be one useful tool in shifting behavior and enabling friendly competitions. Eventually this map could include all campus buildings and also be displayed at the Frist GreenSpace kiosk.
Create an app / website to connect undergraduate students interested in research with graduate student mentors and build community based on common research interests. Phase 1 involves building an app for undergraduates to use during poster events to easily download graduate student posters of interest and discretely rate interest in research projects and collaborations with grad mentors.
Phase 2 expands on the app's capabilities to include (with accompanying website?): an events check-in function so participants can connect; a searchable research directory of grad mentors and undergraduates; a capability to match research interests and recommend collaborations; a timeline of engagement with program activities, showing past and current collaborations; a calendar listing upcoming program offerings (e.g., lab tours, departmental seminar debriefs, intersession or break-week shadowing opportunities, informal "multi-generational research meals for mentoring"); customized alerts (e.g., events, opportunities).
Dirk Hartog says that the study of how statutes travelled and were received is a great new subject, one that will help legal historians understand a great deal about what law reform and legal change actually meant. We know that legislators copied one another and that legal ideas travelled. But how they did so remains murky. Much of the data has now been digitized. In addition to the specific statues, is there a way to construct an API that will help other projects like Kellen's?
Staff training system: UHS needs a system that allows staff to share required knowledge with colleagues in the department. Uses include topics ranging from blood-borne pathogen training to completing monthly budgets. The ease with which the training modules can be created is key to the success of this system. The system should:
Stockroom inventory system: the current system requires staff withdrawing stock to note the details of each withdrawal on a hand written sheet. These are later transcribed for reordering. If it difficult to get a variety of staff to use this system correctly. Space limitations in McCosh Health Center require that a minimum of essential inventory be kept. The stockroom currently houses approximately 300 different items from suture sets to crutches. More accurate and timely record keeping would streamline the process of reordering as inventory falls below threshold. This project would likely make use of barcodes and handheld scanners.
Without changing the relational structure of the database, areas that need improvement are: (1) the user interface, making transparent methods for finding and relating information; (2) methods for using and comparing images of registry and other objects; (3) a graphic way to use the spatial data and generate plots of architecture, deposits, and objects (in the 1980s and 1990s Kevin Perry had made this possible before the database was transformed into Access); (4) a web interface -- eventually to be made public but currently with a password -- that would allow all users to update and use the database without [a] generating multiple versions of the database and [b] needing to have a specific program such as Access. Any improvements to the database should maintain a format for the database that allows those running the project to update and revise data, including the addition of new sections of the database (e.g., the merging of the main database with separate systems for information about excavated deposits).
"Find my fit" - a searchable database for our website (and possibly a phone app?) to help students find the right volunteer opportunity, service project, or student group within the Pace Center that's right for them. (Possibly pulling from data in our Drupal website and/or connection of custom-built student tracking database.)
Student tracking database revamp - Re-work this database so that it is longer-living, has more functionality, and can interface with more systems
Internship scheduling app - Create a scheduling application that can connect us with students to accurately select an internship interview time/place. Would need to interface with spreadsheets/database/student schedules and reflect real-time to avoid double-booking/overlaps.
Something with a social benefit? Many of our student groups are working on critical social issues - hunger, homelessness, the minority achievement gap, prison education reform ... perhaps there are projects for these groups that could solve some key problems.
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.
Marvin is also interested in data analysis and visualization tools for a variety of library systems, in effect a dashboard for the library.
(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?