Thu Aug 29 20:21:12 EDT 2024
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. Many of them have come from Princeton's Program for Community-Engaged Scholarship (ProCES).
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 proposals are new this semester, and are listed in chronological order by time of submission. 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
Michael Lovaglio, Director of Youth Ministry (michael@cranburypres.org)
General description
Located 20 minutes away from campus, First Presbyterian Church of Cranbury manages several pantries. Their Christmas "closet" volunteers and donors distributed over 1,000 gifts last holiday season to local children in low-income households. The amount of gifts is expected to triple this year. To ensure sustainability, the church needs to streamline how information about gifts, distribution, volunteers, and other contacts is gathered and used. The app could be expanded to include the food pantry, baby clothes "closet," and other ministries at the church. This year's big day is Saturday, December 21 for families to come in and "shop."
Minimum Viable Product
A responsive web app that serves as an inventory control system for church's Christmas "closet."
Users: Administrators
There will be three administrators: Michael, a church administrator, and the director of children and family ministries. They must be authenticated, probably via Google login. The administrators must be able to enter or approve:
The administrators also must be able to run dynamic queries on inventory and activity using tags (age range, market value price, real cost of item to church, item type). Example queries:
Users: Youth
The youth are senior volunteers (minors) coordinating the Christmas present drive, who will submit information to be approved by the administrators. They must be authenticated. They must be able to:Stretch Goals
Some stretch goals include:
Contacts
Clifford Wulfman, Periodicals Digitization Coordinator, Princeton University Library (cwulfman@princeton.edu) and Esmé Cowles, Assistant Director, Library Software Engineering, Princeton University Library (escowles@princeton.edu)
General description
The Daily Princetonian's 150th anniversary is next year, and they want to hold events where students, alumni, and visitors could interact with the archive to bring the history of The Prince to life.
Princeton University Library already has a system for searching, browsing, and reading digitized newspapers (https://papersofprinceton.princeton.edu/), including The Daily Princetonian. This interface provides a sophisticated reading tool and standard search capabilities, but we have extracted the full text of every issue from 1876 through 2015 into text corpus intended to serve as a data source for applications that employ natural-language-processing techniques, including data visualization, network analysis, and question-answering using Large Language Models.
We invite students to use this corpus to build a companion to the Papers of Princeton reading environment. It should enable users to engage with the text in ways not already supported by the Papers of Princeton interface.
Minimum viable product
Stretch Goals
Contact
Molly Dykstra, Project Lead, admin@120eaststate.org
General Description
120 East State (120ES) was formed in April 2022 to create The Steeple Center in the heart of Trenton. 120ES’s purpose is to transform the First Presbyterian Church complex in the heart of Trenton into a community-centered performing arts venue, an engine of economic development, and an opportunity for local empowerment giving voice, space, and welcome to its neighbors. As the steeple of this historic church has stretched high above the downtown skyline signaling hope and mission, 120ES seeks to redirect the path laid 300 years ago and create a symbol of shared vision in the community.
Project Description
120ES has funding to support historic interpretation projects especially to lift up stories of marginalized populations that have some connection to the First Presbyterian Church, the land upon which it sits, and the surrounding areas of Trenton. 120ES wants to discover and share untold stories in interesting and engaging ways with the help of historic interpretation planners. Additionally, 120ES seeks a tool that will allow the general public or login credentialed contributors to suggest topics, like a "History Mystery," contact information, or resources to uncover more information about the stories of the people who are tied to the area. The list of sub-topics of interest is provided here as examples of categories of content they anticipate collecting (i.e. you are not expected to do any historical research but these may be desired content category tags):
Minimal Viable Product
An online archive/repository to collect and share text, images, video or audio clips, ideas from the general public, and other content that will support 120ES's historic interpretation initiatives; a responsive web app that is accessible to people of all abilities.
Users: Readers
Users from the general public must be able to browse content. They also must be able to contact administrators via a question submission box that includes fields for the user's name and email address or phone number.Users: Contributors
Contributors must be able to login via Google authentication, and must be able to create and edit a user profile. After providing permission/consent for 120ES to edit submitted content (checkbox?), contributors must be able to share things such as:
Users: Administrators
Administrators will be staff or dedicated volunteers/stakeholders with login credentials. The application must support approximately four administrators. They must be able to:
Stretch goals
High priority stretch goals:
Medium priority 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.