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.