Selecting an Adviser

Seminars and one-on-one advising

All independent work requires faculty advising. Advising can take two forms: independent work seminars or one-on-one advising. 

Seminars allow a small group of students and a faculty adviser with shared interests to meet and work on related projects. They are are recommended for students who would like to have a bit more structure built into their project. In the seminars, students meet weekly with their instructor/adviser and get regular feedback from their peers.

Students doing one-on-one independent work projects work on their own and schedule meetings with their advisers independently. If you are doing one-on-one advising, you will need to reach out to a faculty member and ask if they are able to help you with your senior thesis or independent work project. If you are in an independent work seminar, the faculty member leading that seminar will be your adviser. We find that students are most successful in one-on-one independent work projects when they are self-motivated, proactive, organized, responsible, resourceful, passionate about the project, and able to work independently.

Independent work sign up form

Once you have selected IW seminars or found an individual project and adviser, you must indicate your selections by filling out a sign up form on the independent work portal. 

The form asks you to choose one of the following options:

• I will be in an independent work seminar next semester
    (the usual choice for first-time IW students)
• I will be doing one-on-one research with a professor next semester
    (the usual choice for senior BSE students with previous IW experience)
• I will be doing a senior thesis this year
    (the usual choice for senior AB students, plus some senior BSEs)
• I will not be doing any form of independent work next semester

You can revisit the IW Sign Up form as many times as you like to adjust your selections. If you do not fill out the form before the deadline, then you will be assigned an IW seminar or individual adviser at the department’s discretion.

How to Contact Faculty for Advising

Send the professor an e-mail. When you write a professor, be clear that you want a meeting regarding a senior thesis or one-on-one IW project, and briefly describe the topic or idea that you want to work on. Check the faculty listing for email addresses.

Parastoo Abtahi, Room 419

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Augmented Reality (AR), and Spatial Computing
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Input techniques for on-the-go interaction (e.g., eye-gaze, microgestures, voice) with a focus on uncertainty, disambiguation, and privacy.
  • Minimal and timely multisensory output (e.g., spatial audio, haptics) that enables users to attend to their physical environment and the people around them, instead of a 2D screen.
  • Interaction with intelligent systems (e.g., IoT, robots) situated in physical spaces with a focus on updating users’ mental model despite the complexity and dynamicity of these systems.

Ryan Adams, Room 411

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

Research areas:

• Machine learning driven design
• Generative models for structured discrete objects
• Approximate inference in probabilistic models
• Accelerating solutions to partial differential equations
• Innovative uses of automatic differentiation
• Modeling and optimizing 3d printing and CNC machining

Andrew Appel, Room 209

Available for Fall 2024 IW advising, only

• Research Areas: Formal methods, programming languages, compilers, computer security.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Software verification (for which taking COS 326 / COS 510 is helpful preparation)
  • Game theory of poker or other games (for which COS 217 / 226 are helpful)
  • Computer game-playing programs (for which COS 217 / 226)
  •  Risk-limiting audits of elections (for which ORF 245 or other knowledge of probability is useful)

Sanjeev Arora, Room 407

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Theoretical machine learning, deep learning and its analysis, natural language processing. My advisees would typically have taken a course in algorithms (COS423 or COS 521 or equivalent) and a course in machine learning.
• Independent Research Topics: 
  • Show that finding approximate solutions to NP-complete problems is also NP-complete (i.e., come up with NP-completeness reductions a la COS 487). 
  • Experimental Algorithms: Implementing and Evaluating Algorithms using existing software packages. 
  • Studying/designing provable algorithms for machine learning and implementions using packages like scipy and MATLAB, including applications in Natural language processing and deep learning.
  • Any topic in theoretical computer science.

David August, Room 221

Not available for IW or thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Computer Architecture, Compilers, Parallelism
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Containment-based approaches to security:  We have designed and tested a simple hardware+software containment mechanism that stops incorrect communication resulting from faults, bugs, or exploits from leaving the system.   Let's explore ways to use containment to solve real problems.  Expect to work with corporate security and technology decision-makers.
  • Parallelism: Studies show much more parallelism than is currently realized in compilers and architectures.  Let's find ways to realize this parallelism.
  • Any other interesting topic in computer architecture or compilers. 

Mark Braverman, 194 Nassau St., Room 231

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computational complexity, algorithms, applied probability, computability over the real numbers, game theory and mechanism design, information theory.
• Independent Research Topics: 
  • Topics in computational and communication complexity.
  • Applications of information theory in complexity theory.
  • Algorithms for problems under real-life assumptions.
  • Game theory, network effects
  • Mechanism design (could be on a problem proposed by the student)

Bernard Chazelle, 194 Nassau St., Room 301

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Natural Algorithms, Computational Geometry, Sublinear Algorithms. 
• Independent Research Topics
  • Natural algorithms (flocking, swarming, social networks, etc).
  • Sublinear algorithms
  • Self-improving algorithms
  • Markov data structures

Danqi Chen, Room 412

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Natural Language Processing, Deep Learning
  • My advisees would be expected to have taken a course in machine learning and ideally have taken COS484 or an NLP graduate seminar.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Representation learning for text and knowledge bases
  • Pre-training and transfer learning
  • Question answering and reading comprehension
  • Information extraction
  • Text summarization
  • Any other interesting topics related to natural language understanding/generation

Marcel Dall'Agnol, Corwin 034

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Theoretical computer science. (Specifically, quantum computation, sublinear algorithms, complexity theory, interactive proofs and cryptography)

Tri Dao

• Research Areas: Machine learning

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

Jia Deng, Room 423

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

•  Research Areas: Computer Vision, Machine Learning.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • 3D Vision
  • Object recognition and action recognition
  • Deep Learning, autoML, meta-learning
  • Geometric reasoning, logical reasoning

Adji Bousso Dieng, Room 406

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Vertaix is a research lab at Princeton University led by Professor Adji Bousso Dieng. We work at the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and the natural sciences. The models and algorithms we develop are motivated by problems in those domains and contribute to advancing methodological research in AI. We leverage tools in statistical machine learning and deep learning in developing methods for learning with the data, of various modalities, arising from the natural sciences.

Robert Dondero,Corwin Hall, Room 038

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas:  Software engineering; software engineering education.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Develop or evaluate tools to facilitate student learning in undergraduate computer science courses at Princeton, and beyond.
  • In particular, can code critiquing tools help students learn about software quality?

Zeev Dvir, 194 Nassau St., Room 250

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computational complexity, pseudo-randomness, coding theory and discrete mathematics.
• Independent Research: I have various research problems related to Pseudorandomness, Coding theory, Complexity and Discrete mathematics - all of which require strong mathematical background. A project could also be based on writing a survey paper describing results from a few theory papers revolving around some particular subject.

Benjamin Eysenbach, Room 416

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: reinforcement learning, machine learning. My advisees would typically have taken COS324.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Using RL algorithms to applications in science and engineering.
  • Emergent behavior of RL algorithms on high-fidelity robotic simulators.
  • Studying how architectures and representations can facilitate generalization.

Christiane Fellbaum, 1-S-14 Green

Available for single-semester IW, 2024-2025. No longer available for senior thesis advising.

• Research Areas: theoretical and computational linguistics, word sense disambiguation, lexical resource construction, English and multilingual WordNet(s), ontology
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Anything having to do with natural language--come and see me with/for ideas suitable to your background and interests. Some topics students have worked on in the past:
  • Developing parsers, part-of-speech taggers, morphological analyzers for underrepresented languages (you don't have to know the language to develop such tools!)
  • Quantitative approaches to theoretical linguistics questions
  • Extensions and interfaces for WordNet (English and WN in other languages),
  • Applications of WordNet(s), including:
  • Foreign language tutoring systems,
  • Spelling correction software,
  • Word-finding/suggestion software for ordinary users and people with memory problems,
  • Machine Translation 
  • Sentiment and Opinion detection
  • Automatic reasoning and inferencing
  • Collaboration with professors in the social sciences and humanities ("Digital Humanities")

Adam Finkelstein, Room 424 

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computer graphics, audio.

Robert S. Fish, Corwin Hall, Room 037

Available for single-semester IW, 2024-2025. No longer available for senior thesis advising.

• Research Interests:
  • Networking and telecommunications
  • Learning, perception, and intelligence, artificial and otherwise;
  • Human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work
  • Online education, especially in Computer Science Education
  • Topics in research and development innovation methodologies including standards, open-source, and entrepreneurship
  • Distributed autonomous organizations and related blockchain technologies

Michael Freedman, Room 308 

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Distributed systems, security, networking
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Projects related to streaming data analysis, datacenter systems and networks, untrusted cloud storage and applications. Please see my group website at http://sns.cs.princeton.edu/ for current research projects.

Ruth Fong, Room 032

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, interpretability, explainable AI, fairness and bias in AI
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Develop a technique for understanding AI models
  • Design a AI model that is interpretable by design
  • Build a paradigm for detecting and/or correcting failure points in an AI model
  • Analyze an existing AI model and/or dataset to better understand its failure points
  • Build a computer vision system for another domain (e.g., medical imaging, satellite data, etc.)
  • Develop a software package for explainable AI
  • Adapt explainable AI research to a consumer-facing problem
• Note: I am happy to advise any project if there's a sufficient overlap in interest and/or expertise; please reach out via email to chat about project ideas.

Tom Griffiths, Room 405

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

Research areas: computational cognitive science, computational social science, machine learning and artificial intelligence

Note: I am open to projects that apply ideas from computer science to understanding aspects of human cognition in a wide range of areas, from decision-making to cultural evolution and everything in between. For example, we have current projects analyzing chess game data and magic tricks, both of which give us clues about how human minds work. Students who have expertise or access to data related to games, magic, strategic sports like fencing, or other quantifiable domains of human behavior feel free to get in touch.

Aarti Gupta, Room 220

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Formal methods, program analysis, logic decision procedures
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Finding bugs in open source software using automatic verification tools
  • Software verification (program analysis, model checking, test generation)
  • Decision procedures for logical reasoning (SAT solvers, SMT solvers)

Elad Hazan, Room 409  

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research interests: machine learning methods and algorithms, efficient methods for mathematical optimization, regret minimization in games, reinforcement learning, control theory and practice
• Machine learning, efficient methods for mathematical optimization, statistical and computational learning theory, regret minimization in games.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Implementation and algorithm engineering for control, reinforcement learning and robotics
  • Implementation and algorithm engineering for time series prediction

Felix Heide, Room 410

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Computational Imaging, Computer Vision, Machine Learning (focus on Optimization and Approximate Inference).
• Potential Topics for Independent Research include:
  • Optical Neural Networks
  • Hardware-in-the-loop Holography
  • Zero-shot and Simulation-only Learning
  • Object recognition in extreme conditions
  • 3D Scene Representations for View Generation and Inverse Problems
  • Long-range Imaging in Scattering Media
  • Hardware-in-the-loop Illumination and Sensor Optimization
  • Inverse Lidar Design
  • Phase Retrieval Algorithms
  • Proximal Algorithms for Learning and Inference
  • Domain-Specific Language for Optics Design

Peter Henderson, 302 Sherrerd Hall

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Machine learning, law, and policy

Kyle Jamieson, Room 306

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Wireless and mobile networking; indoor radar and indoor localization; Internet of Things
• See other topics on my independent work ideas page (campus IP and CS dept. login req'd)

Alan Kaplan, 221 Nassau Street, Room 105

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

Research Areas:

• Random apps of kindness - mobile application/technology frameworks used to help individuals or communities; topic areas include, but are not limited to: first response, accessibility, environment, sustainability, social activism, civic computing, tele-health, remote learning, crowdsourcing, etc.
• Tools automating programming language interoperability - Java/C++, React Native/Java, etc.
• Software visualization tools for education
• Connected consumer devices, applications and protocols

Brian Kernighan, Room 311

Available for single-semester IW, 2024-2025. No longer available for senior thesis advising.

• Research Areas: application-specific languages, document preparation, user interfaces, software tools, programming methodology
• Independent Research Topics: 
  • Application-oriented languages, scripting languages.
  • Tools; user interfaces
  • Digital humanities

Zachary Kincaid, Room 219

Available for Fall 2024 single-semester IW advising, only

• Research areas: programming languages, program analysis, program verification, automated reasoning
• Independent Research Topics:
• Develop a practical algorithm for an intractable problem (e.g., by developing practical search heuristics, or by reducing to, or by identifying a tractable sub-problem, ...).
• Design a domain-specific programming language, or prototype a new feature for an existing language.
• Any interesting project related to programming languages or logic.

Gillat Kol, Room 316

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research area: theory

Aleksandra Korolova, 309 Sherrerd Hall

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Societal impacts of algorithms and AI; privacy; fair and privacy-preserving machine learning; algorithm auditing.

Advisees typically have taken one or more of COS 226, COS 324, COS 423, COS 424 or COS 445.

Pravesh Kothari, Room 320

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Theory

Amit Levy, Room 307

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, Embedded Systems, Internet of Things
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Distributed hardware testing infrastructure
  • Second factor security tokens
  • Low-power wireless network protocol implementation
  • USB device driver implementation

Kai Li, Room 321

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Distributed systems; storage systems; content-based search and data analysis of large datasets.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Fast communication mechanisms for heterogeneous clusters.
  • Approximate nearest-neighbor search for high dimensional data.
  • Data analysis and prediction of in-patient medical data.
  • Optimized implementation of classification algorithms on manycore processors.

Xiaoyan Li, 221 Nassau Street, Room 104

Available for single-semester IW, 2024-2025. No longer available for senior thesis advising.

• Research areas: Information retrieval, novelty detection, question answering, AI, machine learning and data analysis.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Explore new statistical retrieval models for document retrieval and question answering.
  • Apply AI in various fields.
  • Apply supervised or unsupervised learning in health, education, finance, and social networks, etc.
  • Any interesting project related to AI, machine learning, and data analysis.

Lydia Liu, Room 414

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: algorithmic decision making, machine learning and society
• Selected topics:
  • Theoretical foundations for algorithmic decision making (e.g. mathematical modeling of data-driven decision processes, societal level dynamics)
  • Societal impacts of algorithms and AI through a socio-technical lens (e.g. normative implications of worst case ML metrics, prediction and model arbitrariness)
  • Machine learning for social impact domains, especially education (e.g. responsible development and use of LLMs for education equity and access)
  • Evaluation of human-AI decision making using statistical methods (e.g. causal inference of long term impact)

Wyatt Lloyd, Room 323

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Distributed Systems
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Caching algorithms and implementations
  • Storage systems
  • Distributed transaction algorithms and implementations

Alex Lombardi, Room 312

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Theory

Margaret Martonosi, Room 208

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Quantum Computing research, particularly related to architecture and compiler issues for QC.
• Computer architectures specialized for modern workloads (e.g., graph analytics, machine learning algorithms, mobile applications
• Investigating security and privacy vulnerabilities in computer systems, particularly IoT devices.
• Other topics in computer architecture or mobile / IoT systems also possible.

Jonathan Mayer, Sherrerd Hall, Room 307 

Available for Spring 2025 single-semester IW, only

• Research areas: Technology law and policy, with emphasis on national security, criminal procedure, consumer privacy, network management, and online speech.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Assessing the effects of government policies, both in the public and private sectors.
  • Collecting new data that relates to government decision making, including surveying current business practices and studying user behavior.
  • Developing new tools to improve government processes and offer policy alternatives.

Mae Milano,Room 307

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research area: Distributed Systems
  • Topics:
    • Local-first / peer-to-peer systems
    • Wide-ares storage systems
    • Consistency and protocol design
• Research area: Programming Languages
  • Topics:
    • Type-safe concurrency
    • Language design
    • Gradual typing
    • Domain-specific languages
    • Languages for distributed systems

Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Room 405

Available for single-semester IW, 2024-2025. No longer available for senior thesis advising.

• Research Areas: Human-Computer Interaction, Social Computing, Public-Interest Technology, Augmented Reality, Urban Computing
• Research interests:developing public-interest socio-technical systems.  We are currently creating alternatives to gig work platforms that are more equitable for all stakeholders. For instance, we are investigating the socio-technical affordances necessary to support a co-op food delivery network owned and managed by workers and restaurants. We are exploring novel system designs that support self-governance, decentralized/federated models, community-centered data ownership, and portable reputation systems.  We have opportunities for students interested in human-centered computing, UI/UX design, full-stack software development, and qualitative/quantitative user research.
• Beyond our core projects, we are open to working on research projects that explore the use of emerging technologies, such as AR, wearables, NFTs, and DAOs, for creative and out-of-the-box applications.

Christopher Moretti, Corwin Hall, Room 036

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Distributed systems, high-throughput computing, computer science/engineering education
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Expansion, improvement, and evaluation of open-source distributed computing software.
  • Applications of distributed computing for "big science" (e.g. biometrics, data mining, bioinformatics)
  • Software and best practices for computer science education and study, especially Princeton's 126/217/226 sequence or MOOCs development
  • Sports analytics and/or crowd-sourced computing

Radhika Nagpal, F316 Engineering Quadrangle

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: control, robotics and dynamical systems

Karthik Narasimhan, Room 422

Not available for IW or thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Natural Language Processing, Reinforcement Learning
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Autonomous agents for text-based games (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/textworld/)
  • Transfer learning/generalization in NLP
  • Techniques for generating natural language
  • Model-based reinforcement learning

Arvind Narayanan, 308 Sherrerd Hall 

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

Research Areas: fair machine learning (and AI ethics more broadly), the social impact of algorithmic systems, tech policy

Pedro Paredes, Corwin Hall, Room 041

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

My primary research work is in Theoretical Computer Science.

 * Research Interest: Spectral Graph theory, Pseudorandomness, Complexity theory, Coding Theory, Quantum Information Theory, Combinatorics.

The IW projects I am interested in advising can be divided into three categories:

 1. Theoretical research

I am open to advise work on research projects in any topic in one of my research areas of interest. A project could also be based on writing a survey given results from a few papers. Students should have a solid background in math (e.g., elementary combinatorics, graph theory, discrete probability, basic algebra/calculus) and theoretical computer science (226 and 240 material, like big-O/Omega/Theta, basic complexity theory, basic fundamental algorithms). Mathematical maturity is a must.

A (non exhaustive) list of topics of projects I'm interested in:
  * Explicit constructions of better vertex expanders and/or unique neighbor expanders.
  * Construction deterministic or random high dimensional expanders.
  * Pseudorandom generators for different problems.
  * Topics around the quantum PCP conjecture.
  * Topics around quantum error correcting codes and locally testable codes, including constructions, encoding and decoding algorithms.

 2. Theory informed practical implementations of algorithms
 
Very often the great advances in theoretical research are either not tested in practice or not even feasible to be implemented in practice. Thus, I am interested in any project that consists in trying to make theoretical ideas applicable in practice. This includes coming up with new algorithms that trade some theoretical guarantees for feasible implementation yet trying to retain the soul of the original idea; implementing new algorithms in a suitable programming language; and empirically testing practical implementations and comparing them with benchmarks / theoretical expectations. A project in this area doesn't have to be in my main areas of research, any theoretical result could be suitable for such a project.

Some examples of areas of interest:
  * Streaming algorithms.
  * Numeric linear algebra.
  * Property testing.
  * Parallel / Distributed algorithms.
  * Online algorithms.
 
 3. Machine learning with a theoretical foundation

I am interested in projects in machine learning that have some mathematical/theoretical, even if most of the project is applied. This includes topics like mathematical optimization, statistical learning, fairness and privacy.

One particular area I have been recently interested in is in the area of rating systems (e.g., Chess elo) and applications of this to experts problems.

Final Note: I am also willing to advise any project with any mathematical/theoretical component, even if it's not the main one; please reach out via email to chat about project ideas.

Iasonas Petras, Corwin Hall, Room 033

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Information Based Complexity, Numerical Analysis, Quantum Computation.
• Prerequisites: Reasonable mathematical maturity. In case of a project related to Quantum Computation a certain familiarity with quantum mechanics is required (related courses: ELE 396/PHY 208).
• Possible research topics include:

1.   Quantum algorithms and circuits:

• i. Design or simulation quantum circuits implementing quantum algorithms.
• ii. Design of quantum algorithms solving/approximating continuous problems (such as Eigenvalue problems for Partial Differential Equations).

2.   Information Based Complexity:

• i. Necessary and sufficient conditions for tractability of Linear and Linear Tensor Product Problems in various settings (for example worst case or average case). 
• ii. Necessary and sufficient conditions for tractability of Linear and Linear Tensor Product Problems under new tractability and error criteria.
• iii. Necessary and sufficient conditions for tractability of Weighted problems.
• iv. Necessary and sufficient conditions for tractability of Weighted Problems under new tractability and error criteria.

3. Topics in Scientific Computation:

• i. Randomness, Pseudorandomness, MC and QMC methods and their applications (Finance, etc)

Yuri Pritykin, 245 Carl Icahn Lab

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research interests: Computational biology; Cancer immunology; Regulation of gene expression; Functional genomics; Single-cell technologies.
• Potential research projects: Development, implementation, assessment and/or application of algorithms for analysis, integration, interpretation and visualization of multi-dimensional data in molecular biology, particularly single-cell and spatial genomics data.

Benjamin Raphael, Room 309  

Available for Spring 2025 single-semester IW, only

• Research interests: Computational biology and bioinformatics; Cancer genomics; Algorithms and machine learning approaches for analysis of large-scale datasets
• Research projects:
  • Implementation and application of algorithms to infer evolutionary processes in cancer
  • Identifying correlations between combinations of genomic mutations in human and cancer genomes
  • Design and implementation of algorithms for genome sequencing from new DNA sequencing technologies
  • Graph clustering and network anomaly detection, particularly using diffusion processes and methods from spectral graph theory

Vikram Ramaswamy, 035 Corwin Hall

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas: Interpretability of AI systems, Fairness in AI systems, Computer vision.
• Independen Work Topics:
  • Constructing a new method to explain a model / create an interpretable by design model
  • Analyzing a current model / dataset to understand bias within the model/dataset
  • Proposing new fairness evaluations
  • Proposing new methods to train to improve fairness
  • Developing synthetic datasets for fairness / interpretability benchmarks
  • Understanding robustness of models

Ran Raz, Room 240

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Area: Computational Complexity
• Independent Research Topics: Computational Complexity, Information Theory, Quantum Computation, Theoretical Computer Science

Szymon Rusinkiewicz, Room 406

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computer graphics; computer vision; 3D scanning; 3D printing; robotics; documentation and visualization of cultural heritage artifacts
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Research ways of incorporating rotation invariance into computer visiontasks such as feature matching and classification
  • Investigate approaches to robust 3D scan matching
  • Model and compensate for imperfections in 3D printing
  • Given a collection of small mobile robots, apply control policies learned in simulation to the real robots.

Olga Russakovsky, Room 408

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, crowdsourcing, fairness&bias in AI
• Independent Research Topics (from AY 2017-2018):
  • Design a semantic segmentation deep learning model that can operate in a zero-shot setting (i.e., recognize and segment objects not seen during training)
  • Develop a deep learning classifier that is impervious to protected attributes (such as gender or race) that may be erroneously correlated with target classes
  • Build a computer vision system for the novel task of inferring what object (or part of an object) a human is referring to when pointing to a single pixel in the image. This includes both collecting an appropriate dataset using crowdsourcing on Amazon Mechanical Turk, creating a new deep learning formulation for this task, and running extensive analysis of both the data and the model

Sebastian Seung, Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Room 153

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computational neuroscience, connectomics, "deep learning" neural networks, social computing, crowdsourcing, citizen science
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Gamification of neuroscience (EyeWire  2.0)
  • Semantic segmentation and object detection in brain images from microscopy
  • Computational analysis of brain structure and function
  • Neural network theories of brain function

Jaswinder Pal Singh, Room 324

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Boundary of technology and business/applications; building and scaling technology companies with special focus at that boundary; parallel computing systems and applications: parallel and distributed applications and their implications for software and architectural design; system software and programming environments for multiprocessors.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Develop a startup company idea, and build a plan/prototype for it.
  • Explore tradeoffs at the boundary of technology/product and business/applications in a chosen area.
  • Study and develop methods to infer insights from data in different application areas, from science to search to finance to others. 
  • Design and implement a parallel application. Possible areas include graphics, compression, biology, among many others. Analyze performance bottlenecks using existing tools, and compare programming models/languages.
  • Design and implement a scalable distributed algorithm.

Mona Singh, Room 420

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: computational molecular biology, as well as its interface with machine learning and algorithms.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Whole and cross-genome methods for predicting protein function and protein-protein interactions.
  • Analysis and prediction of biological networks.
  • Computational methods for inferring specific aspects of protein structure from protein sequence data.
  • Any other interesting project in computational molecular biology.

Robert Tarjan, 194 Nassau St., Room 308

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Data structures; graph algorithms; combinatorial optimization; computational complexity; computational geometry; parallel algorithms.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Implement one or more data structures or combinatorial algorithms to provide insight into their empirical behavior.
  • Design and/or analyze various data structures and combinatorial algorithms.

Olga Troyanskaya, Room 320

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Bioinformatics; analysis of large-scale biological data sets (genomics, gene expression, proteomics, biological networks); algorithms for integration of data from multiple data sources; visualization of biological data; machine learning methods in bioinformatics.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Implement and evaluate one or more gene expression analysis algorithm.
  • Develop algorithms for assessment of performance of genomic analysis methods.
  • Develop, implement, and evaluate visualization tools for heterogeneous biological data.

David Walker, Room 211

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: Programming languages, type systems, compilers, domain-specific languages, software-defined networking and security
• Independent Research Topics:  Any other interesting project that involves humanitarian hacking, functional programming, domain-specific programming languages, type systems, compilers, software-defined networking, fault tolerance, language-based security, theorem proving, logic or logical frameworks.

Shengyi Wang, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Room 216

Available for Fall 2024 single-semester IW, only

• Independent Research topics: Explore Escher-style tilings using (introductory) group theory and automata theory to produce beautiful pictures.

Kevin Wayne, Corwin Hall, Room 040

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms; data structures; combinatorial optimization; graphs and networks.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Design and implement computer visualizations of algorithms or data structures.
  • Develop pedagogical tools or programming assignments for the computer science curriculum at Princeton and beyond.
  • Develop assessment infrastructure and assessments for MOOCs.

Matt Weinberg, 194 Nassau St., Room 222

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research Areas: algorithms, algorithmic game theory, mechanism design, game theoretical problems in {Bitcoin, networking, healthcare}.
• Independent Research Topics:
  • Theoretical questions related to COS 445 topics such as matching theory, voting theory, auction design, etc. 
  • Theoretical questions related to incentives in applications like Bitcoin, the Internet, health care, etc. In a little bit more detail: protocols for these systems are often designed assuming that users will follow them. But often, users will actually be strictly happier to deviate from the intended protocol. How should we reason about user behavior in these protocols? How should we design protocols in these settings?

Huacheng Yu, Room 310

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

• Research areas:
  • data structures
  • streaming algorithms
• Independent Research Topics:
  • design and analyze data structures / streaming algorithms
  • prove impossibility results (lower bounds)
  • implement and evaluate data structures / streaming algorithms

Ellen Zhong, Room 314

Available for single-semester IW and senior thesis advising, 2024-2025

Opportunities outside the department

We encourage students to look in to doing interdisciplinary computer science research and to work with professors in departments other than computer science.  However, every CS independent work project must have a strong computer science element (even if it has other scientific or artistic elements as well.)  To do a project with an adviser outside of computer science you must have permission of the department.  This can be accomplished by having a second co-adviser within the computer science department or by contacting the independent work supervisor about the project and having he or she sign the independent work proposal form.

Here is a list of professors outside the computer science department who are eager to work with computer science undergraduates.

Maria Apostolaki, Engineering Quadrangle, C330

• Research areas: Computing & Networking, Data & Information Science, Security & Privacy

Branko Glisic, Engineering Quadrangle, Room E330

• Research Areas: 
  • Documentation of historic structures
  • Cyber physical systems for structural health monitoring
• Ideas for Independent Research Topics:
  • Developing virtual and augmented reality applications for documenting structures
  • Applying machine learning techniques to generate 3D models from 2D plans of buildings
•  Contact: Rebecca Napolitano,rkn2@princeton.edu

Mihir Kshirsagar, Sherrerd Hall, Room 315

Center for Information Technology Policy.

• Research Areas: Technology, society and public policy
  • Consumer protection
  • Content regulation
  • Competition law
  • Economic development
  • Surveillance and discrimination

Sharad Malik, Engineering Quadrangle, Room B224

Select a Senior Thesis Adviser for the 2020-21 Academic Year.

• Research Areas: 
  • Design of reliable hardware systems
  • Verifying complex software and hardware systems

Prateek Mittal, Engineering Quadrangle, Room B236

• Research Areas: 
  • Internet security and privacy 
  • Social Networks
  • Privacy technologies, anonymous communication
  • Network Science
• Ideas for Independent Research Topics:
  • Internet security and privacy: The insecurity of Internet protocols and services threatens the safety of our critical network infrastructure and billions of end users. How can we defend end users as well as our critical network infrastructure from attacks?
  • Trustworthy social systems: Online social networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter have revolutionized the way our society communicates. How can we leverage social connections between users to design the next generation of communication systems?
  • Privacy Technologies: Privacy on the Internet is eroding rapidly, with businesses and governments mining sensitive user information. How can we protect the privacy of our online communications? The Tor project (https://www.torproject.org/) is a potential application of interest.

Ken Norman,  Psychology Dept, PNI 137

• Research Areas: Memory, the brain and computation 
• Lab: Princeton Computational Memory Lab

Potential research topics

• Methods for decoding cognitive state information from neuroimaging data (fMRI and EEG) 
• Neural network simulations of learning and memory

Caroline Savage

Office of Sustainability, Phone:(609)258-7513, Email: cs35@princeton.edu

The Campus as Lab program supports students using the Princeton campus as a living laboratory to solve sustainability challenges. The Office of Sustainability has created a list of campus as lab research questions, filterable by discipline and topic, on its website.

An example from Computer Science could include using TigerEnergy, a platform which provides real-time data on campus energy generation and consumption, to study one of the many energy systems or buildings on campus. Three CS students used TigerEnergy to create a live energy heatmap of campus.

Other potential projects include:

• Apply game theory to sustainability challenges
• Develop a tool to help visualize interactions between complex campus systems, e.g. energy and water use, transportation and storm water runoff, purchasing and waste, etc.
• How can we learn (in aggregate) about individuals’ waste, energy, transportation, and other behaviors without impinging on privacy?

Janet Vertesi, Sociology Dept, Wallace Hall, Room 122

• Research areas: Sociology of technology; Human-computer interaction; Ubiquitous computing.
• Possible projects: At the intersection of computer science and social science, my students have built mixed reality games, produced artistic and interactive installations, and studied mixed human-robot teams, among other projects.

David Wentzlaff, Engineering Quadrangle, Room 228

Computing, Operating Systems, Sustainable Computing.

• Independent Research Topics:
• Instrument Princeton's Green (HPCRC) data center
• Investigate power utilization on an processor core implemented in an FPGA
• Dismantle and document all of the components in modern electronics. Invent new ways to build computers that can be recycled easier.
• Other topics in parallel computer architecture or operating systems