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.