Role Reversals!

Week 12: (4/23/2010)

It is no longer the case that once you are always a teacher - In my case it is more true. I am learning so many new and exciting things from students working at RCOS. Students are on top of the leading edge technology and uses them in their projects. More importantly they inform which ones are good, easier to use and perform better.

This week we had three student presentations and two guest presentations.

They are

1) Dr. Travis Desell (Guest - CS Post Doc)

2) Mr. Will Gill (Guest- dotCIO staff)
3) Eric Allen and Michael O'Keefe
4) Allen Lavoie
5) Brendon Justin

Travis talked about his work on on Volunteer Computing and MilkyWay Project. He and his group (professors and students) use the BOINC open software from Berkeley as a middle layer. His group enjoyed an open source contribution to GPU that sped the computation drstically. They have reached a peta flop computation power and has more volunteers than SETI project.
Recently he and another group has started dnaathome a new volunteer computing project.

Will talked about enhancement to his last semesters (RCOS) project (as an independent study course). Will has developed a Facebook Applications on Event Mashup Maps on Facebook. He has a prototype implementation. He was all set to give a demo - unfortunately Facebook changed their API last Monday (4/19) and hence could not give a demo. Never the less, Will showed a detailed design and implemetation plan to develop a facebook application.

For the students presentation, dashboard http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu/groups/dashboard/1 gives a better justification of their progress.

Eric amd Mike gave a fantastic presentation of their gesture recognition software that work on wrist watches. They gave a nice demo that recognized a circle gesture. Their system uses Java GUI in the front end and a ruby backend. They worked magic. I am eagerly waiting to see what they are going to show in their final demo - will it be air math, or remote slide turner, or some thing else - Stay tuned!

Allen has given a yet another fantastic presntation on his automatic paper classification. He is doing detailed experiments to make his findings on a sound footing. His talk slides (from his blog) can be found here

Brendon has been doing what an open source developed should do - reporting bugs, providing patches to an existing open source project synergy-plus. Brendon's next step is to develop a GUI using QT and I am looking forward to seeing his final demo.

Next Tuesday (4/27) is undergraduate research symposium where five rcos students (and one former rcos student) are participating. Good Luck to all those students.