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: