Students learn the fundamentals behind the networked life Posted
February 21, 2012; 12:45 p.m. For most of us, shopping receipts
are an annoyance, little bits of paper stuffed into the back of
a wallet or dropped to the bottom of a bag. Not to the Cohen-
Shohet sisters of Princeton University. For them, there is
untapped value in those pocketed papers. Not money, but
something even better: data. "It seems so archaic to be using
paper receipts when we are digitizing everything else," said
Danielle Cohen-Shohet, a senior. "There is so much valuable
information about who we are that vanishes when we throw them
away." In a class taught for the first time last fall, Cohen-
Shohet and her twin sister, Leah, developed a computer program
that can analyze that data and offer shoppers and retailers a
way to balance buying habits and bargains. If it works, it could
be the smart bomb of advertising — offering shoppers a
notification on their smartphones of exactly the next thing they
want to buy before they even realize th