Week 7 Progress like July 4th Fireworks!

Week 7: (7/9/2010)

This week (soon after July 4th weekend) was a hectic week - The amount of activity might rival July 4th fireworks!

On Wednesday, we had four students present update talks (these are second round talks). We had talks by

1) Andrew Zonenberg (Guest Speaker - works with Prof Roysam's group)
2) Michael O'Keefe
3) Graylin Kim
4) Ben Shippee


Andrew talked about his open source achievements with GPU accelerated signal processing Library. He has implemented 1 d, 2d, and 3d convolution algorithms with GPU (he currently uses CUDA - with an effort to port to open CL) He has achieved fantastic speed ups and he had an excellent presentation. His presentation may be found here.

Mike has been making a steady progress with his chronos (Watch operating system). He also wants to use the gesturing software with android. His progress is remarkable despite minor setbacks.

Graylin is making a nice progress with making the data from NY State Legislation Site more accessible with his python library API. Graylin has been refactoring his code and making it more compact. More importantly he is interacting closely with the people who are involved with open data.

Ben has also done fair amount of work on the command line version of his Open Math Game. Ben knows what is left to be completed and he is making every effort to complete it.

Great Job Andrew, Mike, Graylin and Ben.

On Friday (7/9), we had a guest speaker Dr. Luis Ibanez (from kitware) talking about "Educating the Next Generation of FOSS Developers". Luis gave a captivating talk on the issues involved with just using proprietary software. His talk touched economy, copyright, patents, licences, case studies, business models, software process, open access publishing and peer production. He could relate these topics from his experiences in teaching at RPI and as a lead developer of ITK.

His talk may be found here

I learned a lot of things this week (despite we had very hot spell and try to put a damper in my (brain) activities)