COSCON is an annual competition where students compete to solve problems using computer science methods on topics ranging from programming and systems to theory and machine learning. The event is organized by the Princeton ACM Student Chapter, which is supervised by Pedro Paredes.

This year, 140 students took part, from multiple departments and graduation classes. The event is sponsored by the computer science department and supported by a host of departments and centers across campus. The event is also a recruitment opportunity for students, and outside companies support COSCON to get a look at the skills of students studying at Princeton.

Some links: social media post, event website and Princeton student chapter website.

Sebastian Caldas and Marcel Dall’Agnol taught COS 125: The Art and Science of Computer Programming—an introductory computer science course for Princeton admits and prospective transfer students—at the Summer 2024 iteration of the the Freshman Scholars Institute program. The program and course are targeted at first-generation/low-income students with little or no prior experience with computer science, and run from early July to mid-August.

Pedro Paredes leads the Princeton competitive programming club and coaches the teams of students that participate in the ICPC competitive programming contests. Several Princeton teams competed in the ICPC Greater NY Regional and one qualified for the ICPC North America Championship, which took place in May.

Christopher Moretti was selected to lead the scoring for a College Board pilot study in January relating to some of the forthcoming Advanced Placement Computer Science A course changes. Then in June, he again participated in the in the AP CSA exam reading in Kansas City. This was Moretti’s eleventh reading overall, ninth in leadership, and sixth in the senior leadership at the reading. Finally, in September he was tapped to write sample exercises for the new course materials.

Rob Fish has been promoted to Senior Lecturer, joining Phillip Y. Goldman ‘86 University Lecturer Kevin Wayne and Senior Lecturers Bob Dondero, Alan Kaplan, Christopher Moretti, Xiaoyan Li in having been recognized with an increase in rank since the University’s spring 2020 establishment of a new career ladder for teaching faculty.

Marcel Dall’Agnol received a spotlight article, highlighting his research interests in theoretical computer science topics, including quantum computing and cryptography, and his primary school teaching roots back home in Brazil.

Kevin Wayne and Christopher Moretti were among the faculty recognized by the School of Engineering and Applied Science Excellence in Teaching Awards.

Bob Dondero was (yet again!) among the faculty recognized by the Princeton Engineering Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching, this time for the Fall 2023 semester.

A tremendous hiring season resulted in three new lecturers signing on with Princeton CS: Sebastian Caldas, Marcel Dall’Agnol, and Vikram Ramaswamy. Caldas joins after finishing his Ph.D. in ML at CMU and will likely begin in COS 126; Dall’Agnol joins after finishing his Ph.D. in TCS at the University of Warwick and will likely begin in COS 226; and Ramaswamy continues in the department after completing his Ph.D. in ML interpretability with Olga Russakovsky and will likely begin in COS 324.

Xiaoyan Li has been promoted to Senior Lecturer, joining Phillip Y. Goldman ‘86 University Lecturer Kevin Wayne and Senior Lecturers Bob Dondero, Alan Kaplan, and Christopher Moretti in having been recognized with an increase in rank since the University’s spring 2020 establishment of a new career ladder for teaching faculty.

Christopher Moretti was selected to participate in the 2023 Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam reading, held in Kansas City and online in June. This was Moretti’s tenth overall, eighth in leadership, and fifth in the senior leadership at the reading. After returning from Kansas City, Moretti also served in the leadership conducting a test reading of a potential new exam component, as College Board continues to refine the course curriculum.

Ruth Fong was the featured guest in episode 5 of season 2 of Brains, Black Holes, and Beyond, the Daily Princetonian’s podcast highlighting science and technology research on campus and beyond. In the episode, Fong talks about her collaborations across campus (for example, in geosciences with Indu Panigrahi ‘23) and her work in AIML explainability, ethics, and fairness considerations (for example, cues and artifacts for gender in ML models with Dora Zhao ‘21, MSE *22 and Nicole Meister ‘22). She also offers an important reminder to undergrads (and everyone else!) about avoiding the effortless perfection perception trope.

Christopher Moretti received the Excellence in Teaching Award for the School of Engineering and Applied Science from the Undergraduate Engineering Council for his work in the Spring 2022 offering of COS 217.

Pedro Paredes was the featured guest in episode 4 of season 2 of Brains, Black Holes, and Beyond, the Daily Princetonian’s podcast highlighting science and technology research on campus and beyond. In the episode, Paredes talks about his work in theoretical CS related to quantum computing and the future of CS’s larger impacts on society, and challenges the listeners with a puzzle to ponder.

Jérémie Lumbroso served on the organizing committee for this year’s Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education as one of the web and data co-chairs. SIGCSE TS is one of the leading CSEd conferences, bringing together thousands of computer science education researchers and practitioners.

Pedro Paredes’ first year at Princeton has included joining the Princeton’s ACM chapter’s competitive programming team as a coach and advisor. In February, he took 4 teams (each composed of 3 Princeton undergrads) to the Greater New York Regional of the International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC). There, Princeton’s top team qualified for the North American Championship, which will be held in Orlando in May. The Princeton undergraduates were Daniel Yang ‘26, Abiram Gangavaram ‘25, and Raheem Idowu ‘25 with Pedro Paredes.

Jérémie Lumbroso leads a digital humanities team that won the Leverhulme Research Grant to use quantitative approaches to study Baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti’s corpus of keyboard sonatas.

Alan Kaplan has been appointed Chair of the Steering Committee for the IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference.

Pedro Paredes has joined the COS teaching faculty after completing his Ph.D. in spectral graph theory at CMU. He will begin his Princeton career in COS 126 and will likely take on key roles in COS 445 or other theoretical CS courses in the future.

Alan Kaplan has won funding from Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education for his project The Raspberry Pi Precept – Improving Engagement of Students with Prior Programming Experience. This initiative, for students who have programming experience but did not place directly into a 200-level course, allows these students to explore engineering opportunities in the context of the Raspberry Pi platform. The hope is that these students should remain more engaged and get more enrichment from the course while their peers learn core programming skills these self-selectors are already familiar with. All students will still complete the same assessments and cover the same advanced precept material that is new to nearly everyone in the course.

Rob Fish has won funding from Princeton’s 250th Anniversary Fund for Innovation in Undergraduate Education for his project Special Topics in Computer Science - Web3: Blockchains, Cryptocurrencies, and Decentralization, which will form the core of the future COS 471 course on these emergent technologies.

Following the University’s spring 2020 establishment of a new career ladder for teaching faculty, the 2020-2021 academic year was spent filling the University Lecturer ranks. Now in 2022 the trio of Bob Dondero, Alan Kaplan, and Christopher Moretti are the first cohort to be promoted to Senior Lecturer.

Kevin Wayne and Christopher Moretti were selected to participate in the 2022 Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam reading, held in Kansas City and online in June. This was Wayne’s first reading, after joining the Development Committee last year. This was Moretti’s ninth overall, seventh in leadership, and fourth in the senior leadership at the reading.

Ruth Fong won grants from the Princeton Engineering Innovation Fund for interpretable computer vision models and from Open Philanthropy to study AI Alignment.

Xiaoyan Li was accepted to participate in the second cohort of the Council on Science and Technology’s Community of Practice Fellowship. This program aims to consider opportunities to diversify science and engineering curricula to better represent a wide range of people and cultures, identify and decrease bias, and highlight the possibilities for interaction between STEM and social justice.

Donna Gabai received the Excellence in Teaching Award for the School of Engineering and Applied Science from the Undergraduate Engineering Council for her work in the Fall 2021 offering of COS 217. This qualifies her for the Lifetime Achievement Award, as a five+ time winner!

Bob Dondero was (again!) among the faculty recognized by the Princeton Engineering Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching, this time for the Fall 2021 semester.

Ruth Fong has joined the COS teaching faculty after completing her Ph.D. in computer vision at Oxford and spending a year teaching CS at the K-12 level back home. She began her Princeton career in COS 126, directing the new end of course projects, and will likely take on key roles in COS 324 and COS 429 in the future.

Following the University’s spring 2020 establishment of a new career ladder for teaching faculty, Kevin Wayne has been promoted to University Lecturer as part of the inaugural University cohort for the new senior rank. The milestone was recognized with a biographical feature by Doug Hulette.

Kevin Wayne has been selected to serve on the AP CSA Development Committee for 2021-2022 as one of four higher ed members of the 8-member group responsible for creating the exam and evolving the course description.

Christopher Moretti has been selected as a Question Leader for the 2021 Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam reading. This year’s CSA exam reading – which will again be held online – will be his eighth overall and his sixth as part of the leadership.

A feature story by Sarah Wells on the Princeton University news homepage highlighted several undergraduate student projects from Bob Dondero’s COS 333 Advanced Programming Techniques course that benefited local nonprofit groups, Fair Share Housing Center and TASK, the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen.

Donna Gabai received the Excellence in Teaching Award for the School of Engineering and Applied Science from the Undergraduate Engineering Council for her work in the Fall 2020 offering of COS 217.

Bob Dondero and Kevin Wayne were among the faculty recognized by the Princeton Engineering Commendation List for Outstanding Teaching in the Fall 2020 semester.

Doug Hulette’s biographical feature story of recent undergraduate and master’s alumnus Lance Goodridge delved into Jérémie Lumbroso’s mentorship of Goodridge and their wide-ranging contributions to the software infrastructure that helps the department scale to meet the demands of increased enrollments.

Doug Hulette’s spotlight story Teaching Faculty: The Key to ‘Opening the Door’ touted the accomplishments, vision, and personalities of the COS teaching faculty.

Kevin Wayne, Maia Ginsburg, and Ibrahim Albluwi (COS 226), Bob Dondero (COS 333), and Jérémie Lumbroso (COS 488) were recognized on the Princeton Engineering Commendation List of Outstanding Teaching for spring 2020.

Christopher Moretti has been selected as a Question Leader for the 2020 Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam reading. He is one of only 24 computer science educators to be appointed to the senior leadership for this year’s CSA exam reading, which will be held online for the first time. This is his seventh year participating at the reading and his 5th year as part of the leadership.

Kevin Wayne (COS 226), Jérémie Lumbroso (COS 126) and Ibrahim Albluwi (COS 226) received the Excellence in Teaching Award for the School of Engineering and Applied Science from the Undergraduate Engineering Council for their Fall 2019 courses.

Kevin Wayne has been named the 2019 Outstanding Teacher in Computer Science by the Chairs of N.J. Computer Science Departments at their annual conference.

Donna Gabai (COS 217) and Ibrahim Albluwi (COS 226) received Excellence in Teaching Awards for the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Continuing his efforts with the John H. Pace, Jr. ‘39 Center for Civic Engagement, Alan Kaplan spearheaded another summer of Princeton outreach in Puerto Rico – adapting COS 126 material for the University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez and performing community service throughout the island. His team included Ezra Zinberg ‘21, Jeremy Chizewer ‘22, Leslie Kim ‘22, and Anabelle Chang ‘21.

Christopher Moretti has been selected as a Question Leader for the 2019 Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam reading. He is one of only 23 computer science educators to be appointed to the senior leadership for this year’s CSA exam reading. This is his sixth year participating at the reading and his 4th year as part of the leadership.

Two LIFT-CS publications received a total of 4 citations in papers published at SIGCSE this year:

• Dan Leyzberg, Jérémie Lumbroso, and Christopher Moretti’s 2017 ITiCSE paper Nailing the TA interview: Using a rubric to hire teaching assistants was cited by Amir Kamil, James Juett, and Andrew DeOrio’s exciting paper Gender-balanced TAs from an Unbalanced Student Body, as well as by Martin Ukrop, Valdemar Švábenský, and Jan Nehyba’s paper Reflective Diary for Professional Development of Novice Teachers, as part of the best-practices literature.
• Dan Leyzberg and Christopher Moretti’s 2017 SIGCSE paper Teaching CS to CS Teachers: Addressing the Need for Advanced Content in K-12 Professional Development was also cited twice, in work from Harvard and SRI: Paulina Haduong and Karen Brennan’s Helping K—12 Teachers Get Unstuck with Scratch: The Design of an Online Professional Learning Experience and Daisy Rutstein, Yuning Xu, Kevin McElhaney, and Marie Bienkowski’s Developing Implementation Measures for K-12 Computer Science Curriculum Materials

Christopher Moretti has been selected as an associate program chair for this year’s ITiCSE paper review. He is one of 26 in the role, responsible for guiding discussion during the review process, calibrating separate reviewers’ assessments of the papers, and writing a metareview with a recommendation of acceptance or rejection.

Alan Kaplan received the Pace Center for Civic Engagement Faculty Service Award for 2019.

Rob Fish is the new President of the IEEE Standards Association Board of Governors, elected in the 2017 Annual Election. In this service role, he leads the IEEE SA activities directed at policy, standards administration, and other functions.

Rob Fish has been elevated to the rank of IEEE Fellow. According to the IEEE, “Fellow is conferred by the Board of Directors upon a person with an extraordinary record of accomplishments in any of the IEEE fields of interest. The total number selected in any one year does not exceed one-tenth of one percent of the total voting Institute membership.”

The Daily Princetonian highlighted COS126 as one of the most popular courses on campus with a brief profile.

LIFT founder Robert Sedgewick and late long-time collaborator Philippe Flajolet were honored for their book Algorithmic Combinatorics, which has defined a now-thriving subfield that combines combinatorial mathematics and algorithmic analysis.

Millions, Billions, Zillions: Defending Yourself in a World of Too Many Numbers is Kernighan’s latest offering, using examples collected over the years for COS109 to illustrate the perils of innumeracy in modern life.

In an interview about the growth of the department, Jennifer Rexford emphasized the opportunities available in computer science at Princeton and highlighted some teaching innovations that are helping to advance the teaching state of the art in light of that growth.

Ibrahim Albluwi has a paper, A Closer Look at the Differences Between Graders in Introductory Computer Science Exams, in the August 2018 edition of the journal.

Striving for the University’s updated unofficial motto “In the Nation’s Service and the Service of Humanity”, Alan Kaplan, Shanila Shakil ‘21, Elise Colter ‘21, Christy Lee ‘21, and Lucy Norton ‘21, spent part of Summer 2018 in Puerto Rico teaching computer science and aiding in relief efforts after Hurricane Maria. The program was a collaboration between the Office of International Affairs and Operations, the Department of Computer Science, and the Pace Center for Civic Engagement. Kaplan was received the Pace Center Faculty Service Award (February 2019) for extraordinary acts of service during the 2017-18 academic year,

Ibrahim Albluwi participated in a working group at ITiCSE 2018 with the topic of reviewing the last decade and a half of results in novice programming research. The working group produced two peer-reviewed publications for the conference: A review of introductory programming research 2003—2017 and Introductory programming: a systematic literature review.

Donna Gabai, Dan Leyzberg, and Christopher Moretti were selected to participate in the 2018 Advanced Placement Computer Science A exam reading, held in Kansas City in June. They joined higher ed faculty and high school teachers from around the world in evaluating free response questions completed by approximately 66,000 students. The reading is considered the best form of professional development for high school teachers in part because of the presence of higher ed faculty. This was Gabai’s first reading, Leyzberg’s fourth, and Moretti’s fifth.

Christopher Moretti chaired a paper session at this year’s SIGCSE symposium. The session, with the theme CS1, included work from Stanford, UIUC, and Trinity University.

Dan Leyzberg, Jérémie Lumbroso, and Christopher Moretti’s paper Nailing the TA interview: Using a rubric to hire teaching assistants was accepted at ITiCSE 2017 in Bologna.

Dan Leyzberg and Christopher Moretti’s paper Teaching CS to CS Teachers: Addressing the Need for Advanced Content in K-12 Professional Development was accepted at SIGCSE 2017.

NBody, COS126’s Assignment 2 “rite of passage”, was accepted at SIGCSE 2017 in the Nifty Assignments session.

Christopher Moretti (COS 326) and Iasonas Petras (COS 217) received the Excellence in Teaching Award for the School of Engineering and Applied Science from the Undergraduate Engineering Council for their Fall 2016 courses.

The textbook by Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne, developed for COS126, earned a spot in the Best of Computing list based on reviwers and category editors for Computing Reviews, editors in chief of journals the publication covers, and computer scientists in both industry and academia.

Brian Kernighan received the award for “Outstanding Impact on the Profession of Computer Science Education” at this year’s New Jersey Computer Science Chairs conference.

Brian Kernighan was honored at this year’s commencement with the University’s highest teaching award, recognizing excellence teaching a service course for non-majors, COS109, and a popular departmental course, COS333.

Autocomplete Me, a COS226 assignment developed by Matthew Drabick and Kevin Wayne, was accepted at SIGCSE 2016 in the Nifty Assignments session.

Robert Sedgewick and Kevin Wayne received the award for excellence in undergraduate teaching, chosen by Princeton students elected to the academic honor society ΦΒΚ.