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: