More Videos 12/9/2011

More Videos 12/9/2011

Thanks to Mike O'Keefe (December 2011 graduate) and Jorel Lalicki we have most the talk videos posted in rcos youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1

These are the talks presented on 12/9/2011.


Peter Hajas on Scoop




Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz RPI Directory



Jorel Lalicki Timing Framework



Zack Fry and Bobby Zheng on Crowd Sourcing for Geo Identification




Jerry Shneider on Command Line Interface for Android Programming



John Dickinsond (December 2011 Graduate), Jon Kriss and Frank Kotarski on Convalot



Jarret Kruger on Featherview



Timothy Chambers on Semantic ImageBoard
Talk 1



Talk 2



Tim McMullen and Amelia Peterson on MetaLib

Talk 1

Week 14 Fall (12/9/2011) 2011

Week 14 Fall (12/9/2011) 2011

This was our last weekly meeting for the Fall Semester. We had a near perfect attendance with a few guest students to boot. A group photo and a photo of graduating seniors (Mike O'Keefe and John Dikinson) were taken.

RCOS End of the semester group photo



Graduating Seniors




This week we had 7 presentations:


1) Jerry Schneider: on Command line like display for Android (very brief) https://github.com/schnej7/Android_CommandlineLikeDisplay and http://youtu.be/7epVYRrPnqU

2) Jarrett Cruger: on Featherview http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/featherview/

3) Timothy Chambers on Semantic ImageBoard http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/semantic-imageboard/

4) Peter Hajas: Scoop and Other Cool Projects http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scoop/

5) Zach Fry, Bobby Zheng on Crowdsourcing Geointelligence http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/crowdsourcing-for-geointelligence/

6) Jorel Lalicki on Timing Framework http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/timing-framework/

7) Alex Hunt, John Dickinson, John Kriss, Frank Kotarski on Convalot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/universal-batch-converter/

Jerry is one among the two who is giving third talk. He has created a new project on android command line programming - It will be easier for new people to join this project and ease into Android programming.

Jarret is working on Featherview an image view of twitter feeds. He is planning to get images for friends twitter feeds as well as trending images. He is planning to use a POS tagger using NLTK (done by his friends) to find trends etc.

Timothy Chambers is refactoring his code. He has nice implementation. He is planning to use a hierarchical tag system (which he is currently researching on).T

Peter gave a presentation on his new project on ticker display for his MAC. It has an infinite loop and he uses TwUI and he has built a library using this interface.

Zach And Bobby talked about their results using clustering. They were able to identify (using clustering techniques from Amazon data). They had 100% identification of all the houses. Ther results also agreed with MIT CSAIL's report of approximately 60% accuracy among Amazon Turk users.

Jorel gave a presentation of hs tming framework. t has come along fine. It currently works with Microsoft C++ framework. He plans to extend this other IDE's for C++

Finally Alex, JohnD, JohnK and Frank talked about their Convalot system. They are ready to release the second version. It works with different plugins. They were unable to show a demo (with GUI) because of there system upgrade to the latest ubuntu version.

It was a rousing finale to the semester.

Week 13 (12/2/2011) Fall 2011

Week 13 (12/2/2011) Fall 2011

This is the penultimate week of the semester. We had scheduled four student talks and one guest talk. At this time of the year (with winter slowly settling in and the stress levels increasing) two students got sick and could not present.


The speakers for this are:

1) Rob Carr '11 (Canonical/Ubuntu) Working in Free/Open Source Software

2)Joe Dougherty and Tom Rozanski Network Management Systehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifm http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/network-management-system/


3)Zachary Clapper: Touch of Math http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/touch-of-mathematics/


As stated in his abstract, Rob Carr discussed his experiences in working with Canonical/Ubuntu as a Software Engineer. Topics ranged from development models,
business models, to the day to day of working in free software. There were a lot of questions/discussions on the latest Ubuntu release (11.10) Unity. Many of RCOS have detailed questions and suggestions.

Joe talked about Tom and his work on Network Management System. They have used PHP for their implementation. Joe also gave demo of their project and pointed the glitches that current version has had.

Zach talked about his touch of math project. Zach is working on the front end (and Joe L is working at the back end - Joe L is busy with exams at Cornell). Zach has implemented subscript, superscript, reek symbols and variable substitution (and needs a lot of testing).

Again a time well spent listening to these talks.

Videos Galore

Thanks to Michael O'Keefe and Jorel Lalicki, we have all the talk videos (from Week 7 to Week 12)

Week 7:
Asher Glick and Beth Towna on Briefcase



Week 11:

Zach Fry and Bobby Zheng on Crowdsourcing for Geointelligence



Week 11

Mike Heise AGML



Week 12:

Alex Gaynor NumPy



Asher Glick and Beth Towna on Briefcase





Part 2:



Jerry Schneider BlueMesh



Josh TCP Multiplexing




Part 2


Andrew Parsons (Microsoft) Microsoft and Open Source



Part 2

Week 12 (11/18/11) Fall 2011 Semester

Week 12 (11/18/11) Fall 2011 Semester

Fall semester is slowly winding down. We had four talks by students and a gust talk by Andrew Parsons (http://twitter.com/MrAndyPuppy • http://blogs.msdn.com/andrewparsons from Microsft.

Student presenters were:

1) Alex Gaynor on NumPy for PyPy http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/numpy-for-pypy/

2) Asher Glick and Beth Towns on Briefcase
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

3) Jerry Schneider on BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

4) Josh Komoroske on tcp multiplexing https://github.com/joshdk/muxd

and our guest speaker Andrew Parsons talked about Microasoft and Its open source efforts

Alex has been steadily working on getting NumPy working - He has to modify his design to take care of type issues. Their current solution seems to compile and execute very fast. He also talked about a related project of f2py.

Asher and Beth talked about Briefcase. Beth has problems with the server and hence backend work is being stalled. asher has been coding away in Javascript to get to the front end. He had a skeleton working - still needs a lot of functions to be implemented. They have done a very good job so far.

Jerry has been working on getting all the thread issues resolved. He got to the point where there are no more crashes. Jerry plans to get an application with his blue mesh running before the end of the semester. Again Jerry showed his tenacity to overcome his obstacles. He has finished two of the four tasks he has set.

Josh gave a fascinating about tcp multiplexing. This is especially useful when some ports are blocked. Josh showed a number of interesting demos of his software. An excellent job by Josh (even though he has not officially in the payroll of rcos this semester)

Andrew enlightened us about the open source software efforts at Microfot. Andrew aslo pointed the one of the core kenrel developers (for liunx kernel) is a microsoft employee. Andrew also talked about other competitions that Microsoft sponosres.
Through raffles, Andrew gave away many prizes from Microsoft.

As usual students asked very many interesting questions and suggestions to all the speakers. An excellent particpation and their questions amde me realize some of the finer details which I did not pay attention to.


An excellent week where I gained a lot of new ideas, broadened my understanding and made me appreciate things that I have not seen before.

Week 11 (11/11/11) Fall 2011 Semester

Week 11 (11/11/11) Fall 2011 Semester

The fall color season is almost over. With so many activities going on, we just had two talks. But these two talks were well presented.

The speakers are:

a) Zach Fry and Bobby Zheng on Crowdsourcing for Geointelligence
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/crowdsourcing-for-geointelligence/

b) Mike Heise Adaptive Math Game Library
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/adaptive-game-math-library/

Zach and Bobby are working on crowd sourcing str for 2500ategy to mark images in an image map.
They have created amazon turk. They have 225 images, and each image has max 20 pins, and each image will be analyzed 20 times. Thats 4500 * 20 or 90000 individual data points. This will be a set to work on. They have completed partial analysis -they have data from 2500 people. The technology they use is the amazon cloud services, EC2, server, SQL. Zach and Bobby will hope to complete their data-mining tasks before the end of Fall semester.

Their slides can be seen here

Crowdsourcing for geoint-11.11.11

View more presentations from mskmoorthy

Next Mike talked about his project on adaptive math game library. Mike has progressed in many fronts -mainly in ARM support. Mike has also written a number of test program for his libraries. Mike asked many interesting, thought proving and entertaining questions to audience. Clearly a few of RCOS students knew most of the answers.

There were many questions and suggestions from the audience.

As usual, I learned a lot.

Week 10 (11/4/11) Fall Semester 2011

Week 10 (11/4/11) Fall Semester 2011

Fall season is in full swing - the clock is set back to the standard time from daylight savings time. RCOS is also going full blast. With this week, every one has given their first talks (they are more like update talks - the students having done good amount of work) and a couple have given their second talks too. All in all, projects have been progressing well - on the other hand, I wish they could push themselves a bit harder and accomplish more. In a sub reddit at rpi, two rcos projects ( rpidirectory and yet another course scheduler were posted and got a very useful feedback.

This week we had four speakers.

1)Brendon Justin, Austin Wagner, Alex Shulgach, Umesh Jonnalagadda
on Shuttle Tracker http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-shuttle-tracker/

2) Ben Shippee on BitProspector http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bitprospector/


3) Timothy Chambers on Semantic ImageBoard
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/semantic-imageboard/


4) Michael O'Keefe on Interminer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/interminer/

Brendon, Alex and Austin (and Umesh) have been progressing. They have a mock up of their website and and improving their ETA (current one has approximate error of 5 minutes)- Their IPhone and Android Apps have also been upgraded. There were a few suggestions and comments for improving. Their talk slides may be seen here.

Shuttle trackersecondpresentationfall2011

View more presentations from mskmoorthy

Next Ben has talked on Bitrospector. Ben had a minor hardware setback with his server. Ben has recovered well. Ben has been progressing well. Ben has been working on the back end. Ben plans to provide some graphical user interface to make his system more functional. There were questions about the future of BitProspector. Ben said that his system is applicable to other systems as well.

Timothy (first time RCOS student) gave an attention gathering on Semantic ImageBoard.
Timothy has implemented part of his system. He is using cakePHP which makes sql query much simpler. The main feature of his system is simple to use, with crowd tagging and hierarchical tagging to make his system easier and fun to use. His talk generated a lot of questions and suggestions.

Michael talked on his open source project on Interminer. He has implemented Pearson correlation coefficient for similarity testing in genes. For more information about the Pearson correlation, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearson_product-moment_correlation_coefficient

All talks were interesting and I learned something new as usual. One more Friday evening is well spent in the company of wonderful, eager and brainy students.

Week 9 (10/28/2011) Fall Semester 2011

Week 9 (10/28/2011) Fall Semester 2011

What a week it was weather and festivals wise! On Wednesday(10/26/2011), Indian subcontinents, Indians across the country celebrated Deepavali (festival of lights) as the top photo indicates. This weekend (10-28,10/29.10/30) RPI is having family weekend and Honors convocation. Thursday (10/27/2011), we had a snow squall and on Saturday (10/29/2011) we had a big snow storm (with leaves still on trees - causing extensive damages).

We had just two talks this week. We had talks by

1) Matt Mcmullen and Andrea Peterson on Meta Lib http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/metalib/

2) Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz
on RPIDirectory App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Matt and Andrea are working on extracting meta data from files. They are well onto their project. They have extracted meta data for 42 types. They are currently trying to extract meta data out of XML files. They are implementing in C++ and creating libraries. Their programs do not have external library dependencies. There were many interesting questions and suggestions after their talk.

Christian and Dan (Mike is in the chemistry lab) talked about current status of their
RPI Directory project. Their system is now lightning fast, works off line, has a chat
client, Android Client and they all work very nicely. They plan to extend the system to other clubs at RPI and mash them up. Peter Hajas has mentioned that he is developing an IPhone/IPad/Imac(!) application using their API.

As usual we had excellent talks and excellent participation. We had the shortest "official" meeting - we had informal mentoring activity and exchange of ideas/questions/answers afterwards.

Video of 7th week Talks RCOS Fall 2011

Video of 7th week Talks RCOS Fall 2011 (10/14/2011)

Thanks to Mike O'Keefe (RCOS mentor), we have all the five talks videos are on line.
Our youtube channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1

The projects are located in http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/

Mike Heise on Adaptive Math Game Library




Jorel Lalicki on Timing Framework




Zach Clapper on Touch of Maths



Jarret Cruger on FeatherView





Brendan Ashby, Mike Casper and Jonathan Skurka on pLANer



and questions time :

Week 8 (10/21/2011) Fall Semester

Week 8 (10/21/2011) Fall Semester

It has been a very busy and hectic week. On Friday (10/21/2011), Sean O'Sullivan got EOY award (as the above photo shows) - Mike O'Keefe took a lot of photos during the award ceremony and poster
sessions. His photographs can be found here. RCOS students participated in poster session. These students helped showcase some of the work done at RCOS. Thanks to all these students for taking extra work to make posters and be spokespersons for RCOS. I should mention that Mr. Sean O'Sullivan's acceptance speech was outstanding and I personally learned a lot.

We had three presentations on Friday (as we decided to meet with Mr. O'Sullivan and the E club to learn more by joining them at 4:30 pm)

1) Asher Glick and Beth Towna on Briefcase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

2) Jerry Schneider on BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

3) Jeff Hui on YACS - Yet Another Course Scheduler
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/timetable/

Asher and Beth have presented their goals and accomplishments for Briefcase an open source alternative to GoogleDocs. They mentioned some of the limitations of googledocs and how their system is planning to overcome (including offline mode). They are planning to use HTML 5 and javascript in the front end and Django and Python in the back end. iA lot of useful discussions, pointers and suggestions were given.

Jerry is working on providing a mesh network among blue tooth devices. Such an infra structure will not only be applicable to playing games but also to local communications. This will eliminate reliance on servers or service providers for some applications (when the internet service goes down). Jerry has been able to connect one device (his plan is to test with at least one more android device Android 2+ phones - binding, sending and receiving bytes).

Jeff Hui presented about Yet Another Course Scheduler. Jeff has posted his slides in his blog here. Jeff also gave a very nice demo of his current system and it is pretty impressive. Jeff has an ambitious schedule to have a version working by November 2nd - ready for November 7 registration. As Peter said Jeff's presentation was awesome.

In my opinion all the presentations and projects e were outstanding. Please keep up the good work. After our meeting RCOS group joined Mr. Sean O'Sullivan for discussions. Students were especially pleased to meet our donor and talk to him about various things (technology, start-up etc).

After a few phone calls back and forth our Pizza finally came and we shared pizza with others!

It was a fantastic week indeed.

Week 7 (10/15/2011) Fall Semester

Week 7 (10/15/2011) Fall Semester

The fall (semester) is in full swing. Colors are changing in leaves. The RCOS projects are in full swing too!. I am very impressed with the quality of projects and presentation.

This week we had five talks


Mike Heise on Adaptive Math Game Library http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/adaptive-game-math-library/

Jorel Lalicki on Timing Framework http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/timing-framework/

Zach Clapper on Touch of Maths http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/touch-of-mathematics/

Jarret Cruger on FeatherView http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/featherview/

Brendan Ashby, Mike Casper and Jonathan Skurka on pLANer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/planer/

Mike has been working on Adaptive Math Game Library since summer 2011. Now he is the only person working on. He is fixing the copyrights, re-factoring the code, documenting and making the code more manageable. Mike is careful that the adaptive
part will indeed work. Mike's code will work very efficiently on different processors. There were interesting questions and useful suggestions.

Jorel is working on a timing platform to measure the times taken by different segments of code (Jorel emphasized timing framework is not profiling code ) Jorel started with Adaptive Math Game Library and now made timing framework as an independent project. Jorel is also making a nice GUI to visualize results as well as setup of timing framework. Jorel is implementing in Visual C++ IDE framework - currently works in Windows 7 - Jorel hopes to make his project general.

Zach's presentation consisted of showing a demo of current version "Touch of Math" Zach has made many improvements (all in Javascript) that includes evaluation of expressions involving numbers. Touch of Math also works with mobile platforms. Zach has tested his system in Safari and other webkit browsers. Zach got a number of suggestions.

Jarret and Henry are working on visualization system by taking twitter data and getting results from flicker for the corresponding data. The back end (which Jarret is working on) uses Django and the front end uses collage of the photos. Jarret showed an off line (cached) version. It was nice and many suggestions were given by students. These include taking different input and making varied visualizations.

Finally Brendon, Michael and Jonathan talked about their project pLANner - a system to plan and schedule LAN parties (Brendon is president of Rensseleaer Gaming Association (RGA). Their system components include security (authentication ), scheduling and notification. Each of them is taking responsible for one of them. They are well into building their systems. They attracted a large number of questions and suggestions. Joe D suggested that Brendon's group may benefit from the collective security knowledge of the group by talking first with a subset of security experts at
RCOS.

This semester every one is doing a fantastic job with RCOS projects. In addition, a subset of RCOS students helped out with RPI Computer Science Department's open house as a part of recruiting undergraduate students.

RCOS Videos of talks - Fifth and Sixth week Fall 2011

Videos of talks - Fifth and Sixth week Fall 2011

Thanks to Michael O'Keefee, we have all the talk videos are on line. (They are
in http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Fifth Week Talks

1) Brian Zaik and Dr. Karen Devine Sandia National Labs



2) Convalot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/universal-batch-converter/ by John, Jonathan, Alex and Frank



3) Geo Intelligencer by crowd sourcing http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/crowdsourcing-for-geointelligence/ by Zach and Bobby



4) NumPy for PyPy http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/numpy-for-pypy/ by Alex Gaynor




Week 6:

1) PairKit, Howl, Mimsy and other projects http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pairkit/ by Peter



2) Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/ by Colin



Colins Slides:

Rcos intro-2

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

3) SFML Tutorial Series by Beth



Thanks speakers and Mike - Awesome

Week 6 (10/7/2011) Fall Semester 2011

Week 6 (10/7/2011) Fall Semester 2011

With the first mid semester exams behind their back, most of them are working away at
RCOS. We had three talks.

1) Peter Hajas on Pairkit http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pairkit/ and six other project

2) Colin Kuebler on Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

3) Beth Werbaneth on SFML Tutorial series http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sfml-tutorial-series/

Peter gave a whirlwind tour of seven projects he is doing this semester. In Pairkit, he is an easy-to-use pairing and communication open source framework for iOS and OS X
He is progressing well. His Howl project https://github.com/peterhajas/Howl
is a tool for visualizing Yelp data provided for academic sites.
His smissy project (with Tim Horton '11 RCOS alumni) https://github.com/peterhajas/Smissy is a tool for visualizing ioS backups. Peter is also assisting with two other RCOS project (directory project and course scheduler project). Peter, as usual, gave an awesome presentation and answered all the questions.


Colin gave a status report of his project. Nick has done work on the back end (during Summer 2011) using ruby on rails. Colin is concentrating on front end. Colin hopes to complete his project by the end of semester. Colin is coding in Javascript.

Beth has been working hard in her SFML tutorial series. She is also documenting her efforts. Beth has already developed three games which she gave a brief demo. She is programming in C++ under Microsoft Projects. Her documentation and her code will be useful to many students beginning on their projects to making games. Beth showed a lot of details.

We may have only three talks - after listening to these three projects, I thought I have heard thirty presentations. These are awesome progress by these students.

Week 5 Fall 2011 semester (9/30/2011)

Week 5 Fall 2011 (9/30/2011)

With Friday and Saturday (9/29 and 9/30) being career fair at RPI, we had a number of alumni returning to RPI for recruiting. We had the pleasure of having a couple of RCOS alumni (Brian Zaik '09'10 and Eric Allen '10 and Dr. Karen Devine '94 ) come to RCOS and share their wisdom. In addition, we had the usual students group presentations by

1) Convalot by Alex Hunt, John Dickinson, Jonathan Kriss and Frank Kotarski

2) Crowd Sourcing for Geo Intelligence by Zach Fry and Bobby Zheng.

3) NumPy for PyPy by Alex Gaynor.

Brian and Karen started by talking the kind of open source work that is going on in Sandia National Labs. Karen had a concise and succinct slides (4) to describe their work. Starting with Chemical simulation to Kernel level work to Load Balancing and the overall system architecture. They emphasized Sandia's goal to service the nation. It is a very impressive talk.

Eric gave an awesome talk on recruiting and offered tips to students (especially working for start up companies). Eric was articulate, entertaining and provided useful information. His talk slides may be found here:
http://bit.ly/rcos_startup_html.

John, Jonathan, Alex and Frank gave an excellent presentation of their file conversion master utility program. They have a done of debugging and their current system is cross platform and looks very stable. They are improving the gui, a few backend fixes.

Zach and Booby talked about crowd sourcing to gather information about satellite images and photos. They are using Amazon's mechanical turk system. They have got some preliminary results. They are continuing to improve their questions and collect more relevant information.

Finally Alex Gaynor talked about his earlier contribution to blazing fast PyPy, a JIT compiler for Python. His current project is to include numpy (numerical python software) to run blazing fast in PyPy. Alex has already implemented some important code towards NumPy for PyPy. Alex is well known in the community about his contributions. We are expecting to see great things from Alex.

Two great Alumni talks, followed by equally great three student talks - what more one needs?

Talk Videos of first four weeks (Fall 2011)are complete

Talk Videos:

Our youtube channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Week 1: (Thanks to Peter Hajas)

Ben Chang:



Ken Zalewski and Graylin Kim:



Week 3:

Mobile Shuttle Tracker Team http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-shuttle-tracker/ by Austin Wagner, Andrew Shulgach, Brendon Justin and Umesh Jonnalagadda :




Bitprospector http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bitprospector/ by Ben Shippee



Network Management System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/network-management-system/ by Joe Dougherty, Tom Rosenzki and Matthew Heffler:



RCOS and Open Source by Matt Arsenault:

Week 4 (9/23/2011) Fall 2011

Week 4 (9/23/2011) Fall 2011

The semester is picking up momentum with classes, projects, exams and RCOS. Students are doing a fantastic job. We have a standing room only during our Friday meetings. It is always a pleasure to see so many eager and attentive students.

We had four talks this week.

1) Brandon Justin, Austin Wagner, Alexander Shulgach, Umesh Jonnalagadda
:Mobile Shuttle Tracker
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-shuttle-tracker/

2) Ben Shippee: BitProspector http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bitprospector/

3)Joe Dougherty, Tom Rozansk, Matthhew Heffler: Network Management System


4) Matt Arsenault '11 and current graduate student at RPI (in Physics) on Open Source and me

Umesh and Alex gave a presentation (Brendon and Austin did not want to crowd the stage!) about their Shuttle Tracker (continued from last semester) project. They are joining hands with the webtech group - having a common code base (so changing to Ruby on Rails) and improving some algorithms. They have a very good schedule planned. Looking forward to great things from them. Here is their presentation slides

Mobile shuttle tracker_fall_2011_first_present

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Ben talked about his bitProspector (An open source Python/Django application to monitor Bitcoin mining and exchanges.) Ben writes that his work is based on Bitcoin project and to visit http://www.weusecoins.com/ as the introduction video explains the concept nicely. Implementation language will be Python and uses Django.

Joe D, Matt H and Tom R talked about their new project on managing networks Their proposed software will scale up nicely and their open source software also fills a niche in that area. Their presentation did not give much technical details.

Matt Arsenault gave an inspiring talk based on his involvement with open source software. Matt gave a lot of pointers how to get involved and how to stay involved and how to contribute to Open Source. Here are his presentation slides.

Rcos presentation 9-23-2011

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Yet another delightful week!

Videos of Talks (second and third weeks) Fall 2011

Micheal O'Keefe has been videoptaping our talks and has uploaded the talks at our youtube channel. Please check out http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Second week talk videos:

Joe Dougherty - mentoring



Priti Kumar (UPE) on ROCS



Peter Hajas on Presentations



Third Week Talks

Ben Shippee on Observatory



John Luther (Google) on Web M
Part 1


Part 2



Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz on RPI Directory

Week 3 (9/16/2011) Fall 2011

Week 3 (9/16/2011) Fall 2011




We have the official beginning of Fall RCOS projects - students have selected their projects and they have already started working on it - by looking at the observatory and green smileys! (I have to be honest and I am distressed that a few groups have not entered their projects and many entered projects are still red - I do hope that that things will change for the better - an eternal optimist I am!)

This week we had three talks.

1) Ben Shippee on Observatory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/observatory/

2) John Luther (google) on WebM http://www.webmproject.org/

3) Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Michael Horowitz o Directory App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Ben gave an introduction to Observatory and some of its features. Already many have placed their projects. Hope others will follow their footsteps.

John gave an overview of the features of webM (from WebM's webpage:
"WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec.") and many open source projects available with WebM. His talk was well received and many interesting questions followed. To top it off, John gave free T-Shirts to all students.

Christian, Dan and Mike (in spirit) gave an interesting talk on Directory project. They use Google apps, python and django. They also have a nice caching in the backend. They had built a prototype and they showed an excellent demo. A lot of questions and suggestions followed. They are on a fast track (and already number one on the dashboard).

A chilly Friday was warmed up by great talks.

Week 2 - Fall Semester - 9/9/2011

Week 2 9/9/2011



Sean O’Sullivan ’85 (Donor of RCOS) Named Entrepreneur of the Year
http://www.rpi.edu/about/inside/issue/v5n13/osullivan.html
Congratulations Mr. Sean O'Sullivan


This week we had five speakers

Zachary Alberico
Priti Kumar (UPE)
Joe Dougherty
Peter Hajas
Moorthy

Zach gave a brief talk about his project (he has been doing that with a few RCOS members) on a social network site for dating. Zach mentioned some of the cool features of his system that overcomes the algorithmic approach of other sites. Zach uses the
power of people to find a near perfect match and cleverly uses a revenue generating mechanism. The implementation language is Ruby on Rails. Zach's challenge is to make
others use his system. Zach's project provokes interesting questions and discussions.

Priti(UPE) talked about ROCS project (online course scheduling project) and possible projects (including project lead and User Interface portion). This is a great opportunity for some RCOS members to undertake.

Joe requested some of the members to take part in the mentoring role. Mentoring has been very effective in past semesters. I find one learns and does best by following/listening to the advise of their friends and peers. Hope we get some volunteers. Thanks to Mike O'K for taking the video.

Peter gave a scintillating talk on how to make an effective presentation. Peter makes his presentation a dialog between him and the audience. Peter also outlined etiquette
for both the presenters (no bullet, no list, more pictures) and for the audience (no laptop, no cell phone, paying full attention).

Moorthy (that is me) extolled the virtues of writing weekly blogs, having time lines, task lists and pushing code early and often.

What a fantastic way to spend a late evening in the midst of bright and eager students!

Week 1 Fall 2011 (9/2/2011)

Week 1 Fall 2011 (9/2/2011)



Our Fall semester has started with a bang for RCOS. There has been a lot of enthusiasm among students to participate and write open source code. At the same time, a few get intimidated by the past RCOS students and their accomplishments. It is my duty to encourage these students and mentor and guide them gently.



This week we had two talks.

1. Prof. Ben Chang (GSAS and Arts Department - RPI)
2. Mr. Ken Zalewski '89 '91 and Mr. Graylin Kim '11

Ben gave a fantastic tour de force of his research - on games, art and immerse art with videos and his slides. Please look at his website Ben Chang for a lot of his work. His main comment was that open source software is needed for artists - for longevity of the art, the custom software is too expensive, there is no vendor lock in. Ben practices what he preaches. Ben did mention the software development overhead associated with developing open source software. Ben suggested some tools that some of RCOS students can develop.

Ken Zalewki talked about he open source initiatives in NY State Senate and Assembly. They use a lot of open source tools and also contribute back. Main goals of their efforts are to make government transparent, efficient and useful to constituents and elected officials. NY Senate website runs using Drupal 7 which in turn enables the elected officials (trivia information - NY State has 62 senators) and their offices to make easy changes to their websites. Ken's group (part of dotCIO office) also encourages elected officials to maintain facebook, twitter and other social media. This enables the constituents to contact them for expressing their concerns (Ken mentioned about the recent marriage equality bill and the volume of messages). Some of the open source software they use include Linux, as well as Apache, PHP, Java, MySQL, Lucene/SOLR, Drupal, CiviCRM, and Squid.
For more information, please look at http://www.nysenate.gov/open. Their source code repository is in https://github.com/nysenatecio
Graylin who currently works at NY state CIO, started to work on their projects as his RCOS project. He now works there. This is yet another instance of RCOS contributing to the economic well being of NY State!

We are off to a great start and hope the momentum keeps going.

Week 12 (8/12/2011) Summer 2011

Week 12 (8/12/2011) Summer 2011

This is our last week of our summer session. We had a good group of students (including quite a few new students) participate in RCOS and contribute to the open source software efforts. We had two guest speakers (Eric Ameres and Kanai Junichi) and one student (Nicholas Pachulski) presentation. (This time, like last Spring semester, each group gave two talks).

Our speakers are:

1) Eric Ameres - EMPAC

2) Dr Kanai Junichi - MDL

3)Nicholas Pachulski - Koala http://rcos.rpi​.edu/projects/k​oala/

Eric talked about how he joined EMPAC and about his previous experience at ON2 technology (acquired by google Please press here for details). Most of his talk centred around visualization (open source software). This software was devloped by Marc Downie (MIT Media Labs Ph D and Cambridge University Undergraduate). This osftwrae group have NSF funding along with EMPAC and Tetherless world. A lot of coll visualizations and cool new projects are waiting to be done (Future RCOSers please note!)

Eric's talk video may be found below.





Kanai gave a very good presentation on capstone projects for Engineering students at MDL. Most of these projects are sponsored by Companies. So they have to be carefulw hen students working on these projects want their code to be open source. Kanai also mentioned their bugtracking system, documentation and code maintenance. They have given a lot of thought to mentoring, how to break a large project into managebale portions and how to convertthis into a 3 credit course. Kanaki also emphasized the communication and co-operation among group members. Student groups have to submit a rapid protype in 7 or 8 weeks (to get feedback from the mentors) and then improve their design and code during the remianing seven weeks. They educate around 200 students per semester. His talk video is found here.






Finally Nicholas talke about his progress in the back end of Koala System. Nicholas has mastered Ruby on Rails and Git. He also showed a little demo of his system. Colin Kuebler who started Koala is very happy with Nick's back end and Colin plans to integrate his Javascript front end to Nicholas' back end. Nicholas's talk slides are here.

Rcos presentation

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Nicholas's talk video is here.




The summer session went off very well. The students did their work and I enjoyed listening to them as wel as to the guest speakers.

11th week (8/5/2011) Summer 2011

11th week (8/5/2011) Summer 2011

We (the students and instructors) had an excellent opportunity to listen to wonderful talks by distinguished guests. Two presentations by two student groups is also awesome.

Guest Speakers:
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Dr. Derek Bruening - (Google) - DynamoRIO

Trishan.deLanerolle - (HFOSS) - Supply And Distribution using Android in Haiti

Dr. Jim Myers (CCNI) - Research Initiatives in CCNI

Student Speakers

Peter Wakefield, Anthony Onwuasoanya - Auto Scheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoscheduler/

Dina Jacobsen - IdeaBank htttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ideabank/


Derek(MIT Ph D and currently at Google) gave a Tour De Force on the conception and implementation of DynamoRIO - How he developed a fast software which will enable run time debugging - both for security and for debugging and performance/. Derek (currently at Google) has released his software as open source. He has many exciting projects for RCOS students. Please look at Derek's slides here:

Dynamorio rpioss-aug2011

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Video of his talk may be seen here.





Trishan (Trinty College and HFOSS Director) gave a scintillating talk on the HFOSS trip to Haiti to deploy their mobile software. Trishan discussed technical challenges, deployment challenges and Human factor Issues. His talk was an eye opener how dedicated
group of software developers can make an impact on social and humanitarian causes. Video of his talk may be found here.






Jim (CCNI and previously at Pacific North West Super Computing facility) gave an overview of the many new and exciting research activities at Rensselaer. He also talked about the recent NSF proposal. Jim has coordinated with a number of state of the art researchers and integrated into a coherent proposal. Video of his talk may be found here.



Peter and Anthony gave their update talk on Automatic Scheduler (a FireFox plugin). Their system consist of three parts: Data Base Backend, Scheduling and User Interface.
Peter and Anthony's slides may be found here. They have implemented a simple scheduling algorithm. Their demo of their software is pretty nice. Peter and Anthony are planning to modularize their system and implement an advanced scheduling algorithm before releasing their software. Peter's talk slides may be found here.

Auto scheduler presentation_2

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Peter's video may be found here:




Dina has learned a lot of programming skills to her design skills. She designed the over- all system and had a few iterations to improve. She has coded most of it. The data base and the user interface is complete The search also works Adding to data base and different visualizations have yet to be implemented.

Dina's talk slides may found here.

Second presentation idea_bank

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Video fo Dina's talk may be found here

Week 10 (7/29/2011) Summer 2011

Week 10 (7/29/2011) Summer 2011

As the summer semester is slowly winding down, RCOS students are busily trying to complete their projects. With humidity sapping the energy from every source, we (students, instructors) do our best to excel.

This week we had three speakers, the first two being guest speakers.


1) Prof. David Goldschmidt '94 '98' '05 on Advanced Web Sites Developments

2) Prof. Barbara Cutler on Spacial Augmented Reality (Graphics, Architcture and Games)

3) Thomas Chestna - Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

David Talked about his use of open source software plugins (with firefox) taht help him develop websites cleanly, efficintly. David has been not only using Open Source SOftware tools, he has also devloped open source software during his graduate student days (as an example Java GraphBase - from Knuth's Stanford GraphBase!)

Video of his talk may be found here.




Barb gave a fanatstic tour de force talk on Spacial Augmented Reality (Graphics, Architecture and Games). She and her group have done phenomenal amount of interesting research work. The best thing is that she and her group have implemented most of their work and in the process of making them open source. She and her group have interacted with EMPAC and have done some eye popping demos!

Video of her talk can be seen here:





Finally Tom talked about his scrutiny project. Tom has been mentored by Rob Escriva '10 (and a RCOS alumni). Tom has completed most of the work he has set out to do. The only remaining task to be done is testing and comparing his/their system with MOSS and other plagiarism detecion software.

Tom's talk slides may be found here:

Scrutiny 2

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The video of his talk may be found here:



What a glorious way to end the week. I was glad that a few visitors (both from RPI and RIT) attended our meeting an shared the enjoyment.

Week 9 (7/22/2011) Summer 2011

Week 9 (7/22/2011) Summer 2011

Saratoga Racing Season has started on Friday despite the hot and humid temperature in Troy, NY. If racing could start, RCOS can certainly go in full swing. That is whhat we did. Our day was full. We had a HFOSS presentationhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif (by tele-presence) at Wesleyan University. Zach Rowe talked about his project Flagship safety (slides given below). Lee Sharma and Reily Hamilton talked about Nexus - community based website (slides given below). Once they have finished talking, regular meeting of RCOS started. We had four speakers.http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Geoffrey Wright - RPI Planner - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-planner

Sean Austin - RCOSUIR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/user-interface-research-app/

Zach Rowe - Flagship Safety - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flagship-safety/


Lee Sharma & Reilly Hamilton - Nexus - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/community-based-project-management-system/

Geoffrey has implemented adding/removing semesters. He is also in the process of adding more majors, double majors and minors. Geoffrey hopes to scrape the catalog of courses. He hopes to have a working version before the end of summer. His talk slides may be found here.

Rpi planner geoffrey_wright_7-22-2011

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Video of his talk may be found here:




Sean has been reading books and papers to consolidate user interface research. He is on his way of showing his understanding with a prototype of Android weather application. He has implemented a preliminary version and he is planning to release the next version. His talk slides may be found here.

Sean austin uir-2

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Video of Sean's talk may be found here:



Zach presented his accomplishments with his project on Flagship safety. Zach has added more icons (with an example of Troy's foreclosure property). His talk slides may be found here.

Flagship safety, hfoss-7-22-2011

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Video of Zach's talk may be found here:



Finally Lee and Reily talked about their progress on Nexus. With their design in good shape they are well onto their implementation. They are also looking with their prospective customers and seeking the help of an interface designer (RPI alumni)

Nexus2 7-22-1011

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Video of their presentation is here:



As usual the students asked many intelligent questions. A wonderful way to end a week!

Week 8 (7/15/2011) Summer 2011

Week 8 (7/15/2011) Summer 2011

A day after France celebrated Bastille Day, RCOS celebrated in its own way of liberte egalite fraternite by having wonderful talks.

We had talks by

1) Kirk Jalbert (Science Technology Studies Graduate Student) - Guest Speaker

2) Ben Shippee and Jeff Farrell - Observatory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/observatory/

3) Asher Glick and Gabe Malveaux - Olympus http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/olympus/

4) Don Gillespie Mobile Studio for Linux http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-studio-for-linux/

Kirk Jalbert talked about his experiences with community sensor project - His interactions with MDL and how building a hardware to measure air quality, cO₂ level led to some misunderstanding. Kirk also stressed the need to understand various open source licensing issues by all center directors and administrators. Kirk was citing the example of MIT media lab director Joichi Ito (who is also on the board of creative commons) and their business model from open source software efforts (Please read the New York Times article about him. Quotation from New York Times article: That makes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s decision to name a 44-year old Japanese venture capitalist (Joichi Ito) who attended, but did not graduate, from two American colleges as the director of one of the world’s top computing science laboratories an unusual choice. ... He was also an early participant in the open-source software movement and is a board member of the Mozilla Foundation, which oversees the development of the Firefox Web browse, as well as being the co-founder and chairman of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has sought to create a middle ground to promote the sharing of digital information.)

Two videos of Kirk's talks can be found here:

Part 1:



Part 2:



2) Ben talked about his improvements and modification to Observatory. Ben has set up the password recovery feature. Ben has also created about past projects (projects being currently active or not), past members (members being not currently active or not), improved the fetching repositories. Ben has also taken steps to prevent spam users. Ben's next plan is to correct the timing issues, introduce global task lists. Ben's contribution has been very valuable to RCOS this semester. Ben's talk slides may be found here.

Observatory 7 15-11

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Video of Ben's talk may be found here:



3) Asher and Gabe talked about their progress on Olympus, server management program. They have finished substantial portion of their project. Gabe is working on the front end while Asher is working on the back end. Both of them have worked quite well and their system looks impressive. They still have the task of cleaning up front end and to promote their software and make people want to use it. Their talk slides may be found here.

Olympus pesentation2

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Video of Asher and Gabe's talk may be found here:



4) Don has been making a steady progress making Mobile Studio portable to linux (free bsd, mac). Don has completed handling the analog input case, completed digital input, but needs debugging. Don has also created an extensive test suite for unit tests and regression tests. Don has also been advised to use the same naming conventions of variables (by the person in charge of Mobile Studio) - It is a good news for Don as his code will be used in the future. Don has to finish the driver (Don's code base uses open source usb library Libsub 1.12) and to interface with LabVIEW. Cihan (past RCOS member) has been helping Don develop test suites. A true sense of co-operation! Don's talk slides may be found here.

Copy of Mobile Studio Desktop for Linux, part II on Prezi

Video of Don's talk may be found here:



All in all, very nice talks and as usual I learned a lot.

Week 7 (7/8/2011) Summer 2011

Week 7 (7/8/2011) Summer 2011 - July 4th Week

With a short week, we had fireworks on Monday (7/4) and excellent talks (virtual fireworks) on Friday (7/8). We had a guest speaker Gary Schwartz of dotCIO office and chief architect of Open Source Software Calendering System Bedework. We had two student speakers Kenley Cheung and Matthew McMullen, Jorel Lalick and Mike Heise,

Speakers include

1) Gray Schwartz (dotCIO office) - Open Source Software efforts at Rensselaer

2) Kenley Cheung - Concerto Con Moto http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/concerto-motion/

3) Matthew McMullen, Jorel Lalicki and Mike Heise http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/adaptive-game-math-library

Gary talked about the history of Open Source efforts at Rensselaer and problems faced by the open source developers in terms of licensing and distribution. Gary also talked about various success stories with the open source development at Rensselaer (including some of RCOS projects). Gary has pointed out good links, also gave excellent ideas how to get involved and make lasting contributions to Open Source Software. At his request Riley did not videotape Gary's talk.

Kenley's project involves using kinect to control Concerto (digital signage systems). He calls his system Concerto Con Moto (In Italian con moto means with motion). Kenley has contributed code to open source code DepthJS (developed originally at MIT media labs). Kenly is debugging his system (with improved gesture recognition, his system will be fully functional). Kenley even showed a demo. His talk slides may be found here. Kenley answered with satisfaction a number of interesting and probing questions.

Concerto conmoto

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Here is a video of Kenley' talk



Matthew, Jorel and Mike Heise presented their progress with adaptive math game library. Their system chooses the appropriate libraries in an adaptive manner. They have made a lot of progress. They have also developed an excellent testing framework and a performance tool. Each of the three persons presented and was able to describe what his contribution was. It was refreshing to see a
good co-operation among them. Their talks may be found here.

8.7.2011 agml

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Here is a video of Matthew, Jorel and Mike's talk:



All three talks were excellent and I thoroughly enjoyed them.

Week 6 (7/1/2011) Summer 2011

Week 6 (7/1/2011) Summer 2011

We had a couple of distinguished visitors today. Prof. George Nagy (ECSE at RPI) and Prof. Steffano Ferrilli (Bari, Italy). We had two talks by students and we watched two TED videos Dr. Hans Rossling.

Student talks are by

1) Tom Chestna - Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

2) Nick Pachulski - Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

We have all of our talk videos on line (thanks to Riley Hamilton) http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Tom is working on Scrutiny, a project to check plagiarism. This project was started by RCOS alumni Rob Escriva and Rob is mentoring Tom. This is a beautiful partnership of two smart heads working together. Tom showed his contribution and he gave a very fine talk. His talk attracted a lot of interesting and probing questions from students, visitors. Tom
defended the questions. Tom hopes to deploy the software before the end of Summer. His talk slides may be found here.

Scrutiny 07-01-2011.pdf

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Video of Tom's talk may be found here:




Nick had some problems with power point slides and with adapter to his mac book. Colin (mentor for Nick) came to rescue and gave a short introduction. Nick is a bit inexperienced and as an adviser I should take the blame of not prepping him for the talk. Considering all this, Nick gave his talk (albeit short) and Nick has contributed code and to blog. Nick (from his latest blog post) looks like he is getting a hang of Git. His talk slides may be found here.

Koala pres1

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Nick's talk video may be found here.



Since we had two talks we decided to watch two TED videos on visualization by Hans Rossling (http://gapmider.org ) - who has done seminal work on visualization.

First talk is about aids in the world


Second talk is about Asian economic ascendancy and problems Asian country
faces.



Hope our future talks will continue to evolve and show the progress made.

Week 5 (6/24/2011) Summer 2011 - Talk Videos

Week 5 (6/24/2011) Summer 2011 - Talk Videos

Thanks again to Reily Hamilton, we have the talk videos of all the three talks given during 5th week (6/24/2011).

1) Dina Jacobsen on IdeaBank http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ideabank/

Here is a video of Dina's talk.



2) Sean Austin on RCOSUIR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/user-interface-research-app/

Here is a video of Sean's talk.



3) Peter Wakefield and Anthony Onwuasoanya on AutoScheduler
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoscheduler/

Here is a video of Peter and Anthony's talk.



Their talk slides are available from my previous blog http://rcosblogbymsk.blogspot.com/2011/06/week-5-6242011-summer-2011.html

RCOS students are doing an awesome job - Hope they continue to excel and their work/projects/code get appreciated more.

Week 5 (6/24/2011) Summer 2011

Week 5 (6/24/2011) Summer 2011:

The summer solstice is behind us - that means the days will be becoming shorter.But RCOS students are going in full steam. The students's talks are on the youtube channel. http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1 (Thanks to Riley Hamilton.)We have decided to watch one TED video a week after our regular talks to get further inspiration.

This week we had talks by

1) Dina Jacobsen on IdeaBank http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ideabank/

2) Sean Austin on RCOSUIR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/user-interface-research-app/

3) Peter Wakefield and Anthony Onwuasoanya on AutoScheduler
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoscheduler/

Dina is progressing well according to her schedule. She has built up a data model and demo of her basic system (IdeaBank) is almost there. She is also making her extensible to store pictures, audio of the ideas. She is currently exploring the visualization of ideas (like what time ideas originated etc). Her talk slides may be found here.

1 presentation idea_bank

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Sean is researching on the user interfaces and what makes user interfaces tick. He plans to write a summary of user interface research and what are some of the ideas behind these research. Sean plans to make a weather prototype for Android using his user interface research. His talk slides may be found here.

Initial presentation

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Peter and Anthony talked about a firefox plugin to do auto-scheduling of tasks. They plan to use SQLite data base and makes the scheduler. Their motivation came from their own desire not to procrastinate work. They are well on towards their goal. Their talk slides may be found here.

Auto scheduler presentation_1

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These lectures are followed by us watching an inspirational TED video by Sal Khan