Week 5 Spring 2011 (2/25/2011)

Week 5 2/25/2011 Spring 2011



This is how RPI campus looked on Friday 25th Feb, 2011

RCOS follows the inscription found on the General Post Office in New York City at 8th Avenue and 33rd Street (http://www.infoplease.com/askeds/post-office-motto.html )

Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers/students from the swift completion of their appointed rounds/work.

We had a very good turn out despite the weather. We had six talks scheduled.

1)Asher and Tor on Screen Sharing http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flick/posts/
2) Andrew Stromme (Swarthmore College), on "Small Scale Open Source
3) Justin, Alexander and Austin on Mobile Shuttle Tracking
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-shuttle-tracker/posts/
4) Colin. Adam, Amy and Chris on Concert http://blog.concertsoundorganizer.com/
5) Casper, Alex and Jonathan on their project status
6) Jerry on Rossent Vehicular Traffic
https://github.com/schnej7/Rossnet-Vehicular-Traffic-Model

Asher and Tor talked about their project flick - screen sharing - They have a lot of cool ideas - They have givena rought outline and schedule - Looks like their project is bound for success.
Their talk slides may be found here.

Flick slides

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Andrew (Swarthmore College) gave an inspiring talk about open source efforts in Swarthmore College. They have a club level organization and they develop open source in the small -think globally act locally theme. Their software has 3 to 5 developers and around 50 users. THeir software is requested from all over the world.

Mobile shuttle tracking sofwtare has been going in full swing. They have a small demo and they have even implemented Expected time of arrival. They have been developing software for both Android and IPhones. Their talk slides may be found here.


Concert group has made a major breakthrough with restful API - From here on it should smooth sailing for them.

Concert spring 2011_presentation_1

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Anywghere sync's group found Filezilla (another open source product) doing similar things - They want to do some other project either chess teaching program or filezilla contribution. Only time will tell how that is going to go. The slides are in

Anywhere sync

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Jerry talked about Rossnet Vehicular traffic Model. His system is more on perfromance analysis tool and may be useful for evacuation agencies. His talk slides are found here:


All in all I learned a lot - The students are doing the projects and I have great expectations for Spring 2011.

Week 4 (2/18/2011) Week of Watson

Week 4 Spring 2011 (2/18/2011) Watson!



RCOS - Spring 2011 Group Photo with Dr. Chris Welty and Prof Ed. Rogers (Dr. Welty's advisor)


What a fantastic week the past week was. We had heard about Watson playing Jeopardy champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. The lead manager of Watson at IBM Research is Dr. David Ferrucci,who got his masters and doctoral degrees from Computer Science Department at RPI, as well as Dr. Chris Welty, a principal scientist in that group (Prof. Ed Rogers was their adviser). In addition, Chris also got his BS from our department and he was a CS lab director. I had pleasant memories of interacting with both Chris and Dave with their sense of humor and outside the box thinking. In addition to the above two, we have Adam Lally in that group who got his BS from RPI. So we can say 20% of Watson had its origin from RPI!

The upper echelons of RPI did a wonderful three day bash at EMPAC with a panel discussion and TV screening of Jeopardy. You can look at the details here. Either Chris or Adam gave a brief overview of different aspects of Watson before the panel discussion and that set the mood for lively interactions and mind blowing discussions. To top that, excellent food (free to boot) was served at Epicurean Cafe at EMPAC.

Crowd of nerds and geeks (I am proud to be a part of that) cheered when Watson trounced its opponents. The Nay sayers had a field day celebrating the "Toronto" answer. After all if Watson had not said that Nay sayers may feel bad (So Watson was even empathetic - I know I am walking on thin ice). Please read this official blog here about EMPAC experience.


Chris gave a talk to RCOS student about the software engineering aspects of Watson. As usual, Chris's talk was lucid and clearly presented. Chris also invited questions from the audience and as usual RCOS students asked intelligent and engaging questions.

The you tube link to his presentation is here.

Week 3 Spring 2011 - (2/11/2011)

Week 3, Spring 2011 (2/11/2011)

I am at a low point - with getting criticism from all possible places; I am wondering how I could improve - After all this is an open source community and people should be motivated to help others and seek help if they need help.

Despite all my mental agonies, once the talks started, I was in heaven. We had five excellent presentations. Hopefully the presenters will post their slides (I am told that how would someone not in RCOS know that your blog is the only place to go to see the summary information? ) That makes my life easier!

We had talks by
1) Will Gill on Morning mail - http://morningmail.rpi.edu

Morning mail is a new news aggregation that RPI has introduced. It has JSON and RSS feeds. They have bigger plans for tagging and classification. Will gave a nice summary of their system (with out slides or computers). RCOS particpants had many interesting questions and suggestions.

2) Joe L and Zach on Touch of Mathematics http://rcos-touch-of-math.blogspot.com/

Their slides (thise awesome prizzi slides) are here (I am contradicting my own statement by giving the slides).
Joe L is working on the backend , introducing more operators (including operators from Calculus) and Zach is working on the front end - Zach plans to MathJax for rendering equations. Both Joe L and Zach have a schedule and with their expertise, we expect great things!

Touch of Math Spring 2011 on Prezi

3) John, Alex, Fran and Jonathan Universal Batch Converter
http://sourceforge.net/apps/wordpress/unibatchconv - This group has a nifty tabbed feature for converting files. They are using CMAKE to build the system. This groups is looking for boost expertise with MACS for porting their system. They even had a demo in their first presentation! They have a sharp looking website here! They have a detailed schedule posted to the google groups. Please keep up the great work.

4) Mike OK Cage and BioRuby http://chronosgestures.posterous.com/ Mike Ok made my life easier - Had a fantastic blog post with slides in the above link. Again Mike had an awesome demo - Got a number of good suggestions from the group. I am hoping Mike will have airmath ready so that I can write equations in air! Mike is planning to finish Cage and during his break from Cage, he plans to work on bioruby! (ruby aapplications and librarries for bio informatics)

5) McMullen Brothers (Tim and Matthew) AwesomeWav http://awesome-wav.blogspot.com/

Tim is working on making a more robust and secure system. Matthew is working on the front end GUI (Matthew is a freshman and RCOS is so happy to have him with us). They had a number of interesting questions (with brilliant questions alternating from Joe D and Peter H) and a lot of suggestions.

Truly these talks uplifted my spirit!

Week 2 Spring 2011 (2/4/2011)

Week 2 Spring 2011 (2/4/2011)

RCOS is picking up momentum - The peer group is very active
The students are submitting to group mailing list for getting feedback of the people. Viva la "Vox Populi" ! Still there are a lot of small things that need to be ironed out. As a first step, I will be holding office hours for new students/new projects on Sundays from 2 to 5:00 pm in Lally 102 (our new shared workspace)

Our mentors are hard at work: Tim is taping the videos and posting to youtube. Colin is quietly helping everyone. Peter is so enthusiastic it is almost impossible for the RCOS students not to be enthusiastic about the work. Joe is our Systems man. He does all the hardware, router stuff run smoothly. Nate is our observatory guru. Dave does so many things so fast - he is our expert feedback guru. Rob is helping out from Ithaca. Thanks to all of you guys. You make my life/work so much pleasurable!!!

This week we had talks by

1) Cihan Caglayan
2) Joe Dougherty and Tom Rozanski
3) Peter Hajas
4) Matt Arsenault
5) Tim Horton

Cihan is working on a HFOSS project on Fairtrade PeopleLink Scheme. Cihan is extending an open source project. Her talk slides may be found here.

First Presentation - RCOS PEOPLink Project

View more presentations from cihancaglayan.

Tim Horton has posted a youtube link and the talk is here



2) Joe is continuing his work on Fire Department Management systems with Tom. Joe has made a detailed schedule for his project. There were some lively discussions after his talk.

Tim Horton's youtube link and the actual video is here.



3) Peter gave a lively presentation of Mobile Notifier and Widge. Peter has collobarators working with him. Peter's talk also generated a lot of discussions.

Tim Horton's Youtube link

4) Matt is continuing his project on Milkyway. Matt gave a detailed description of the compiler issues with ATI and his proposed solutions. Matt is also pallning to contribute to BOINC.

Tim Horton's youtube link and the talk is here


5) Tim gave a delightful presentation of Notebook (a mathematica style user interface for python/ruby/javascript) back ends. His system is written for Apple computer. Tim has already released the Notebook version 0.001

Tim Horton's youtube link and his talk is here.



All in all we had delightful talks and lively discussions. I learned a lot by attending these talks.

Please keep up the good work!!!!