We made too many wrong mistakes - YB

Week 8 (3/26/2010)

"We made too many wrong mistakes!" was a quote from Yogi Bera - Looks like it is applicable to me. (from the manner I have to answer various questions regarding what I have been doing). We are going on a stretch run with half of the semester is over. This week is the beginning of second round of talks. We had four talks this week.

1) Ben Boeckel, Joe Werther and Rob Escriva

2) John McMaster

3) Android group (Zachary Alberico, Brendan Ashby,Baran Bagcilar,Matthew Gerrior, Lindsey Kennard, Maria Montenegro, Zhenzheng Zhou)

4) Brain Zaik (Web tech Group)

All the groups are updating their blog and code base in Dashboard.

Ben, Joe and Rob's work on CHASM has been going strong - they have their own dash board and build and unit tests. That group says they lost time in getting their unit tests in order - To me, they seem to be doing great. I have to look at their code and dashboard and educate myself - learn a few tricks and tips.

John continues to be our embedded system expert. He has refined his goal and his plan to make a universal decompiler for static library seems plausible (given the expertise of John). John has also taken some time to deal with various copy right and licencing issues.

Android group learned a lot of new things this semester - git, java, android simulator. Since they have a large group, they have added communication overhead. They have more modest goals now - Their presentation provoked anumber of questions and helpful suggestions.

Brian gave his experiences with open source software in a historical and philosophical perspective. He also provided a number of helpful suggestions about how to promote open source software. (Brian and the web tech group has been very successful with designing, developing and promoting Concerto, RPITV streaming media and Flagship).

UPE, ACM and RCOS is running a programming competition this Saturday (3/27/2010). Rob, Ryan, Ben and Evan are some of the leaders with a a lot of volunteers helping them in this excellent undertaking.

Delightful Talks to welcome Spring

Week 7: (3/19/2010)

After the spring break, students in rcos have come back with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. A few announcements:

Allen Lavoie did a poster presentation in Computer Science Department on 3/19/2010. Allen's preliminary results are turning a few heads. Allen did a blog post here where you can see his poster.

Joe, Matt and Brian's votebox has reached the finals of the RPI elevator Pitch competition. I am very glad to see Anna has also reached the finals of the competition for her Interactive Tutorial work . Two out of fifteen finalists is quite good as rcos students represent much less than 14 percentage of undergraduate students at RPI. So a big round of applause for all your achievements.

RPISEC is participating at RIT this week. At least three current members and two past members of rcos are participating in this competition. With their track record, there is no doubt in my mind that they will do well. More details about this will be announced next week.

This week, we had six speakers:

1, Priti and Aileen.
2. Eric and Mike.
3. Brian Michalski (WebTech Group).
4. Peter, Jimmy and Bryan.
5. Tianhe.
6. Moorthy.

To know the details of a students' project, please take a look at the dashboard.

Priti and Aileen have been making good progress with a lightbulb project - though they miss the presence of Peter and the hardware. There have been a number of questions, suggestions and volunteers to help with their project. There are a lot of useful and humanitarian applications to this project.

Eric and Mike have showed interesting and useful things that can be done with two $50 TI watches. They have a working gesture recognition software and demonstrated an application of accelerometer software. Their talk and demo were excellent. They have posted their talk slides here (Hint to others: Please post your talk slides in your blog - I really liked all of your talks and I need time to digest - so I can re-read your slides).

Brian Michalski worked with rcos for a couple of semesters. His contribution to rcos and knowledge
of software development is second to none. Brian is currently working on Flagship (a student government document management system). Flagship is written in Ruby and according to Brian even RPI students (who were accused to be apathetic to student government) are using Flagship software!

Peter, Bryan and Jimmy working on Next Generation Notifier System gave a down to earth talk. They are coding in Perl. This group had a nice demo and talk. They have been updating their blogs, code etc. They have steadily climbed the dashboard ladder!

Tianhe is a rcos student who is participating for the experience. Tianhe, working with Prof. Piper, has been making contribution to Sage, an open source software for doing symbolic and algebraic Mathematics. Tianhe has done some performance tests and he plans to contribute library packages to Sage.


Finally I talked about wearing many hats - (work like a rcos student on a project and personally enjoy triumphs and tribulations!, represent rcos students to the external world (usually outside people are very impressed with the work - at least that is what they tell me), and adviser to rcos students).

I do understand it is easier for me to preach than to practice - But together (you and me) can achieve great things for open source software and rcos.

My slides can be found here:

Week 6 i (not real but imaginary! - Finding my own Roots - Please take a look at this blog for a Mathematical Exposition on Finding Your roots)

Week 6 i (Spring Break 3/10/2010)

Thanks to Luis Ibanez of Kitware, who suggested that I attend,participate and contribute to HFOSS ( http://www.hfoss.org ) - Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (hence the acronym HFOSS) workshop held in conjunction with SIGCSE (http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2010/ ACM Computer Science Education Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for year 2010). This was a delightful experience for me. Going to Milwaukee during a spring break from Troy may not be that enticing, but attending and participating in this workshop was a fantastic experience. I found a lot of kindred people sharing the same goal of developing (or help students develop) open source software for humanitarian purposes. In that sense, I found my roots!

HFOSS is organized by people from Trinity College (Hartford CT), Wesleyen University, ( Middletown CT) and Connecticut College (New London CT). The workshop was supported by NSF, Google and ACM. There was a good turnout for this workshop. I join Greg (redhat) in saying woohoo!

The workshop program can be found here

The format was that we had a key note speaker, a panel discussion and a breakout session followed by summary. There was a lot of twittering activity going on during the workshop. Please take a look at this to get a feel of what was going on during the workshop.

Hal Abelson (MIT and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) author) was the key note speaker.




Here are the notes from Greg (copied from his twitter feed and reversed and edited by me)

university curriculum changes one grave at a time

usc's *purpose* is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property." Source: usc dean.

our *responsibility* as cs academics to resist the intelectual property stampede

open infrastructure is key

keeping cs open is vital because it's the instrumentality for everything else

dspace @ mit, institutional research archive sharing

the conflict between free expression and ip at universities is growing

general counsel of UT notes that taking notes implies a personal use license to create derivative works

read Ms. McSherry(Stanford Law School, currently at FSF), "who owns academic work?"

we are, right now, determining the future of knowledge in the information age.

academic authors give their papers to journals, who then own all rights to it forever.

university libraries are prohibited by licensing agreements to mine data from journals.

endgame of scientific publishing industry: monopolistic control by elsevier

generative platform! Read Zittrain (Harvard Law Professor and currently at Oxford) "the future of the internet"

for all microsoft woes, you need no permission to write and share pc software. The same is not true for iphone/ipad

are we instilling the values of "tinkerability" in our students?

will the mobile infrastructure be tinkerable?

working on the google app inventor to keep mobile platforms tinkerable.

google app inventor looks suspiciously like scratch - It is in fact scratch.

imagine a tenure committee that demands urls for open publications

I participated in the panel discussion along with people from RedHat, Google, RIT, Sahana foundation (an open source disaster management system ) and a number of educational institutes.



Industries complained about lack of knowledge of Faculty members on open source software and practice; Educational Institutes complained about lack of speed of assimilating open source software in their curriculum; Every one complained about lack of diversity and K-12 educational system. There was a lively discussion afterwards.

My job was simple. I just spoke about the outstanding work and projects done by students. I think people are impressed with all the projects (number, quality) and the dashboard to boot.

Here are my slides (I was not allowed to use slides - I used them as guidelines for my brief position statement)

Rcos Hfoss

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

During lunch, enthusiastic and energetic students and faculty members (from Wesleyen, Connecticut college, Trinity College, Oregon State University, North Carolina State University) gave poster presentations. They answered all questions and showed their passion for HFOSS. I wish that I had the resources to bring our students to this workshop and show off their projects (may be next year!)


After lunch, we had three breakout sessions:

A. Curriculum: A Certificate Program (Allen Tucker)

B. Community Building: HFOSS Chapters (Ralph Morelli)

C. Town and Gown Collaborations (Leslie Hawthorn)

I participated in Community Building and Town and Gown Collaborations (as we are allowed to participate in at most two out of three). RCOS is already doing (or attempting to do) this. We need support from every level - more faculty member participation, a kinder administration and cooperation from city, state and federal governments. These are not easy to come by - We have to keep trying and make our efforts sincere - some day things will change.

It will be nice to have HFOSS chapter here at RPI and RCOS be a part of it. Hope that happens sooner than later.

All in all, it was useful (I met a number of people, learned about new projects, made people aware of our projects and RCOS).

A lot of photos are taken during the workshop - As soon as I get a link to them I will post.

Another Set of wonderful Talks

Week 6: (3/5/2010)

Rob, Eric and Nate have updated Spring 2010 projects and its current website is http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu - The Dashboard has been keeping us honest and sincere. Dashboard is also used as a recruiting tool by a few companies! There is a great deal of co-ordination between all the mentors (Rob, Eric and Josh). Nate is helping with a consistent web site using good style sheets.

Students are receiving a lot of accolades for their innovations and it is hard for me to keep up with all that! Please do send me mails/notes about your software (how many downloads, any press/blog notices) and I will post them in Achievements section.

The past week we had six fine talks by the following students:

1) Justin Lipton and Jonathan Rosenberg
2) Allen Lavoie
3) Graylin Kim and Cihan Caglayan
4) Anna Cyganowski
5) Brendon Justin
6) Timothy McMullan and Tom Rozanski

They have been updating their blogs which is reflected in the dashboard

Justin and Jonathan are making good progress with their Medialist which has a nice social networking idea. Their system is (very) cool.

Allen Lavoie got excellent initial results on his automatic paper classification. He had selected nice features and the initial results are very promising.
Here are Allen's beautiful slides.

Algorithmic Detection Of Computer Generated Pa

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Graylin and Cihan are working on Floodlight to make NY State government transparent. This project is done jointly with DotCIO from NY State.

Anna, a first time RCOSer, did a fantastic presentation of MateriaLab, an educational game designed for integrated Material Science Education.

Brendon, a first time RCOSer, is planning to contribute patches, improvements and bug fixes to existing open source software synergy++ (a popular mouse grabbing software between desktop and laptops). Brendon has already done some patches!

Timothy and Tim, also first time RCOSers, are working on AWESOME-wav to do open source steganography with wave files. They have an intial design and are planning for advances/improvements once their initial implementation is completed.

There were plenty of perceptive questions and suggestions from other students. The speakers were able to give appropriate answers/counter comments. I learned as much from these interactions as I listened from the student talks.

Students are planning to code open source projects while spending their spring break away from classes! - At least that is what they tell me!