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:
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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