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.
Video of Don's talk may be found here:
All in all, very nice talks and as usual I learned a lot.
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