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.