On Thursday May 5 and Friday May 6 this year's COS 333 students will give public presentations of their class projects. It's likely that the presentations will be interesting and well done, as they have been in previous years. You're invited! Please feel free to attend as many presentations as you want. Friends are welcome too. The presentations will be in Computer Science Building 105. A schedule, along with a brief description of each project, is appended below. I hope you can attend some of the presentations. Bob Dondero Robert M. Dondero, Ph.D. Lecturer, Department of Computer Science Princeton University ----------------------------------- Thursday 5/5 1:00-1:30: PEOPLES PEOPLES Enables the Observation of Populations Living in Everyday Society Social Science research has traditionally required data that is difficult to gather; by using smartphones as data collection tools we can overcome the methodological limitations that have hampered social science research and kept important questions from being answered. We will design an open source Android application that will be distributed to over 100 reentering prisoners to track their job-search experience. The application will enable: collection of location-based data, collection of anonymized phone call information, distribution of short questionnaires to study participants, contact between study participants and researchers through audio or video messages. We aim to design an application that will outlive the initial study and that is general enough to allow other researchers to use it. We will design a simple web-based front-end that will allow researchers to download information, monitor subject participation, and access communications sent by participants. All together, this will be a powerful tool for sociologists, enabling them to conduct useful, targeted, and inexpensive research on almost any population. ----------------------------------- Thursday 5/5 1:30-2:00: SSH Startups Startups and growing companies are hungry for engineering talent. The truth is that quality developers are difficult and costly to find, let alone recruit. Companies often look to young college students for fresh minds to work over the summer and eventually move to full time, but many come away with summer experiences that don't make use of their true talents or align much with what they are interested in. The key to solving these problems lies in an effective way of matching up companies and student engineers. SSH Startups is a portal for connecting college students to technical internships. The site will feature a listing of students in addition to a listing of companies, so that both sides can reach out to one another. It will have methods for companies to assess the quality of interns without having to browse, open, and read through hundreds of resumes. It will provide means to match students with jobs based on their interests, without the need to search through countless pages of listings. Its sleek, simple interface will focus on the elements that matter, not flooding users with excess information or demanding massive amounts of time to be devoted to the discovery process. SSH Startups: We aim to provide engineering talent for companies, exciting internships for students, and a killer user experience that streamlines the matchmaking process as much as possible. ----------------------------------- Thursday 5/5 2:00-2:30: MealChecker Currently, the system for meal exchanges between members of different eating clubs operates in an outdated and inefficient manner. At the time of the meal, the member must fill out a slip recording the names and clubs of the host and guest, and at the end of every month the clubs sort through these slips, matching them up and charging those members who did not reciprocate meals. All of this is done manually, and is far less organized and efficient than a computerized system would be. We propose to automate this system, saving time for the clubs and providing valuable information to both the clubs and their members. With our system, members would simply enter their meal exchange information using a Web interface connected to a database that keeps track of all exchanges. At the end of the month, the system would automatically sort through the exchanges and send the results to the clubs. Members would also be able to check how many meals are owed, a functionality entirely absent in the current system. Most valuable to the clubs, our system will keep statistics on the exchanges, which would give them the information they need to plan ahead and anticipate trends. Our system would be highly beneficial to both clubs and their members, and would replace an antiquated manual system direly in need of revision. ----------------------------------- Thursday 5/5 3:30-4:00: PlayInPerson The goal of our project is to create an online, chatroom-based environment where people can meet and interact through video chat games. For example, two friends living in different countries can use our site to chat face to face while collaboratively working on a crossword puzzle. Similarly, 4 strangers can meet up and play a game of video poker - the game will be realistic because each person will be able to see his opponents' faces. The goal is to create an in-person like experiences online; hence, our website will be playinperson.com. ----------------------------------- Thursday 5/5 4:00-4:30: OneTree Princeton's student groups share certain commonalities that result in the formation of natural sub-communities within the Princeton community. Students could use such a hierarchical "tree" structure to find groups and events tuned to their liking, while groups benefit from increased exposure to a more targeted audience. We aim to create these "virtual group/community centers" where groups may publicly display information, announcements, special events, and more to the general public. The main competitor, Facebook, is user-centric rather than group-centric, limiting the potential for more complex group relationships. We propose a website that models each group or community as an aggregation of many smaller sub-communities. For example, each dance group is part of the dance community, which in turn is part of the performing arts community, which finally is part of the Princeton community as a whole. Students can thereby view any particular community's page and see an aggregation of events and announcements posted by each sub-community, and browse and navigate between pages with ease. Essentially, our website is offering an organized and interconnected platform which improves the interactions between groups and the general public. ----------------------------------- Thursday 5/5 4:30-5:00: The Commons The Commons is an interactive, multiplayer online implementation of the original board game by Sigrid Adriaenssens. The game is based on Settlers of Catan with added features that address the issue of community-driven sustainability. In The Commons, players compete to develop the most successful empire in an initially unsettled and unhospitable world. Players can build cities in different areas of the world and take advantages of the area's renewable and non-renewable natural resources--like lumber, water power, oil--to build their civilizations. Players must also make decisions about how their actions will affect the environmental health of the world as a whole. By cooperating, players can work together to improve the total quality of life in the world. However, failure to cooperate can lead to the loss of natural resources, the wrath of fellow players, and, eventually, the death of the world and end of the game. ----------------------------------- Friday 5/6 1:00-1:30: Manos The XBOX Kinect is an incredible new technology released towards the end of 2010 that combines an RGB camera and an infrared depth sensor that allows users to control the XBOX 360 gaming console with body motions, not just thumbs. Since its release, an ever growing community of developers has created ways to process the data produced by the Kinect through the use of a personal computer, allowing a computer to track skeletons and fingertips, or a user to control a robot with gestures. Another way this technology has been harnessed has been to allow a user to interact with an operating system. Using bodily gestures to move a mouse cursor around the screen to select files and folders, to browse the web, or to play a game are examples of various implementations. The common feature of all of them however is that the gestures required are predefined; there is no customizability. Our product, Manos, allows a user to develop custom mappings between gestures and actions. Each user can train our product to recognize a certain gesture and link that action to increasing or decreasing the computer's volume, or to launch a certain type of program. In sum, our product allows for a user to customize this new technology to his or her own needs, which we believe will believe will be a central technology in the living room and elsewhere in the coming months and years. ----------------------------------- Friday 5/6 1:30-2:00: Bigfoot Imagine that it's 10pm on Friday night, and you want to know where people are on campus. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a map that showed you this information? Well, Bigfoot is exactly that. Bigfoot is an iPhone application and web interface that shows the movement of Princeton students over time -- both on a personal and aggregate level. Log in with user ID and you can see where you've been spent most of your time today, last week, or maybe just on Tuesdays last month between the hours of 7 and 9pm. Switch to the aggregate map and you can view the location of all Princeton students. There's the answer to your question. You can even filter the map by gender, major, residential college, or class year, because maybe Rocky wants to throw a study break when most of its students are in the area. It's all available on a website and on your iPhone. ----------------------------------- Friday 5/6 2:00-2:30: TigerAlbum What many pop culture websites have proven is that a tight-knit community of frequent visitors can spring up from the simplest collaboration of short, witty, well-moderated text posts. With TigerAlbum, we want to take this to the next level with geotagged photography. Imagine being able to see what's happening, hip, funny, and new around Princeton at an instant, on a map. And not having to do much to add your own photographs on the go with a simple shoot and submit smart-phone apps. TigerAlbum will allow users to search for photographs on the map, share their favorites with friends and discuss them through comments with a very intuitive and appealing interface. ----------------------------------- Friday 5/6 3:30-4:00: Singaporean Bridge An Android app for all card loving players out there. Singaporean Bridge is a trick-winning game rising in popularity that is as simple to play as, but more enjoyable than, Hearts. Whether in single-player mode against AIs of variable difficulty or in multi-player mode against other human players, a groovy and easy-to-use user interface makes it accessible to anyone, regardless of age, level and experience. Play competitively against friends, or complete strangers, improve your ranking and become the new champion! Play anytime, anywhere, with anyone! ----------------------------------- Friday 5/6 4:00-4:30: PUrr Right now, reserving a residential college room for a meeting or event is a real pain. There is no one repository for information regarding attributes and possible booking hours for a room, and the websites for actually booking a room are likewise decentralized. Moreover, the system is poorly automated for college administrators who have to check individual emails to approve them as well as manually advertise when rooms will be unavailable. Our goal is to streamline the process on both sides as well as improve the search experience for users who need a specific type of room. We plan to do this by having a two sided server which will contain calendar information for all the residential college rooms which are available to be booked. Administrators will be able to specify how far in advance students will be able to book, block off days for college events and determine what sort of credentials will be needed to book a room. After a small set up period, administrators will rarely be required to actively approve/requests: although they will be able to see who has reserved when. Meanwhile, students will have booking, room information and search services for all buildings consolidated in one webpage. You can search for rooms based on capacity, equipment availability and time availability among other things. Each room will have an information page which lists these features along with a photo and recent usage history. Hopefully these features will lead to students using the room which suits their need best instead of being limited only to rooms they already know. Excluding some authentication and room searching details, this structure is very general and should very easily allows us to manage room reservation for all residential colleges as well as other places (such as the music building). We do require information on all the rooms which we plan to make available as well as the ability to interface with the university's authentication system but neither of these should be difficult to obtain. Ultimately, we hope that this project will greatly simplify an important task for both students and college officials. ----------------------------------- Friday 5/6 4:30-5:00: Room Scheduling System There is a problem on campus. People are needlessly wasting time and getting frustrated by a disorganized system for scheduling rooms on campus. Right now, the system involves looking up email addresses and sending requests to administrators without any certainty of availability. Depending on the administrator, it could take days before you even find out that the room is not available at that time, so you have just wasted time and now have to scramble to find an acceptable alternative. This uncertainty, wasting of time, and needless hassle can easily be avoided with a centralized service. Imagine, you want a certain type of room at a certain time. With our system, you merely have to open your browser, search for the type of room you want, and you instantly see when certain rooms are available. You click on the room at the right time to make a request, and then you are done. Simple. Intuitive. No uncertainty in your scheduling, and no wasted time. -----------------------------------