Week 14 (12/4/2012) Fall 2012

Week 14 (12/4/2012) Fall 2012

This is the last week of presentation for Fall Semester. Not every one presented their second round of talks. The fall semester also rushed by too fast with so many activities.We had six presentations this week..

1) Dan Vegeto, Chris Higley. Rebecca Nordhauser and jesse Freitas, Collective Co                            ngress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

2) Rachel Redner, Nick Timakondu, and Asher Glick Zadatak
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

3) Mike Agnew  ReserveMe  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

4) Brian Barnes and Joshua Mackinen RQ http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/

5) Sheena McNeil koob kooc - Reverse Cookbook
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/

6) Colin Kuebler Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

Dan Vegeto tried to give a demo of the current version of his system. It seems to have a nice feature - But could not appreciate the full feature because of an email glitch.

Rachel, Nick and Asher presented Zadatak - Unfortunately could not appreciate their contribution because of the lack of a cable.

Mike Presented his current status - he is currently formatting the various forms to be submitted.

Brian and Joshua could not proceed much with the project because of understanding javascript details.

Sheena presented Reverse Cookbook - she has implemented many of the features - could not appreciate because of a server crash just before the presentation.

Colin presented his Koala project and his recent accomplishments. He showed a demo and he has many more features including a community website up his sleeve.

Students worked very hard - unfortunately they were unable to show off their accomplishments for reasons beyond their control. Asher gave a wise advise to maintain a weekly schedule and what if scenarios to those  students who plan to finish much of the work during the winter break.

Good Luck and Happy New Year and Holidays to all of you -

Week 13 (11/27/2012) Fall 2012

Week 13 (11/27/2012) Fall 2012

This week was the penultimate week. Every one is hard pressed for time. Exams, projects and other projects keep all the students very busy. I am glad at least a few students volunteered to give presentations of their projects. The students who presented include:

1. Asher Glick BriefCase and other side projects http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

2. Zhixun(Andrew) Wang Djinta and other side project http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

3.Bharath Santosh, Dimitre Dimitrov on Peirce Logic
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

4. Jerry Schneider Emulator http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-emulator-project/

Asher gave an update of their Briefcase project. It looks all the pieces are done now. He did not have server running to give a demo. By all accounts a version of briefcase (with multiuser editing and code highlighter) is working now. Hopefully it will be released before beginning of Spring Semester. If I understood his talk properly, Asher's briefcase can also be used for concurrent code editing. Asher also talked about his comment making program. It is a small light weight tool and does cool things. Better yet, this tool has been used at least by one other person!.

Zhixun briefly mentioned one additional feature (of calculation) in his Djinta project. He talked out his other project of users distinguishing between TED http://www.ted.com and Onion (spoof of TED) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/the-onion-eviscerates-social-media-experts_n_2188593.html

Zhixun has created a website with links to two videos and ask users to identify which one is which - Then he said it may be viewed as a classification problem (and use machine learning techniques).. Zhinxun gave a cool demo of his website (uses sqlite and jquery) with a provision of users to provide inputs for links to TED and onion videos.

Bharat and Dimitre gave a presentation of Peirce Logic. They have a come long way. Their system is almost to be used by the cognitive science course (from where the idea for this project came).  They gave a nice demo of the functioning of their system (storing of proofs and retrieving old proofs is in the works). But their undo feature (which they implemented) is very nice.

Gerry gave a presentation of yet another side project of his namely Emulator project. He has implemented a lot more games, cleaned up the code have a working timer. He gave a demo which is very impressive.

There were more side projects presentation than actual projects. That is fine - as long as some useful code gets generated. It will be nice to have progress with original projects also.

Week 12 (11/20/2012) Fall 2012

Week 12 (11/20/2012) Fall 2012

With the thanksgiving week around the corner, many students had gone home. With the help of Christian I tried to stream the talks using google hang out - The idea was good - but the audio was not great. Above is a proof (Shawn is giving his talk) my attempt to stream the video. 

The following students presented their talks.

1) Shawn Denbow and Brendan Clark Dr. Memory
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

2) Alex Freska,Patrick Teague and Brian Le Flowur
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

3) Zach Clapper Penguin Electronics Inventory Management System
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/

4) Jorel Lalicki - PILED, Corsair,
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/
 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi..

5) Jeremy Schneider - Rock Scissors Paper - learning game https://github.com/schnej7/RockPaperScissors

Shwan gave a talk outlining the progress. His reverse engineering is going well. Brendan is learning the ropes - learning how to deassemble the code.

Alex and Brian talked about the progress of Flowur - their flowchart program. But for the edge connections to block everything else is going smoothly - They have a few templates. They hope to release a version before the calendar year end.

Zach is continuing his project on Penguin electornics Management System. Zach is working on Javascript front end and it has been going well. He hopes to have a version readyby the end of the academic year.

Jorel was successful in getting his kickstarter project funded. he plans to get the board fabricated and ship out the product by February. Jorel and Tim are making the tutorial for TILaunchpad. Jorel talked about his Corsair project. He is planning to use node.s and his initial design and partial implementation is completed. Jorel is ambitious and he wants to have corsair deployed before Spring semester.

Jerry talked about his learning program to play rock paper scissor game. He has developed many schemes and he is currently ranked 7th. He talked about various strategies he has employed. As I write this blog I read an article in http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html todays newyork times about the importance of deep learning!

Even though there were not that many students attending the talk(rightly so), I greatly enjoyed the talks and the ensuing discussions. 

Week 11 (11/13/2012) Fall 2012

Week 11 (11/13/2012) Fall 2012

Today was total solar eclipse in New Zeland and Australia (happened around 3:30 pm EST) - I was watching it in google hangout - almost missed attending the wonderful meeting of RCOS. Jorel has uploaded almost all the video of  talks in youtube. RCOS channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1  We had  six talks to day.


1) Matt Zanchelli Sonar and  IOSPasscode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ios-passcode/

2) Kyle Keraga and Shoshana Rubinstein CLASS Initiative - Study Groups

3) Asher Glick Rensselaer Phrequencey Identification http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer phrequency-identification/

4) Thomas Chestna Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

5) Prof. Magdon Malik Ismail

6) Damian Mastylo, Austin Gulati, Chris Celi   The Collegiate http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-collegiate/

Matt Z started off with his IOSPasscode and explained some of the details. It is already in the appstore and has been downloaded at least 1000 times and has been getting good reviews. He is currently making his system available in many languages. Matt also demonstrated the working his system. His current project Sonar is for reporting bugs. He has been making a steady progress and he has not integrated with mailer yet.  There were interesting discussions.

Kyle and Shoshana (Student Senators)  presented a project from Student .Senate. They want to develop a system to form study groups. They want to have this system as an opt out system. Their proposed system uses data from rpilms and registrar. My main concern is the privacy issues and administration trusting students developing the system - Of course once the system is developed some one has to maintain it.  Hope the student senate is powerful enough to resolve this. Interesting discussions followed.

Asher presented RFID project. Their system used Processing for GUI . Because of lack of portability, they are moving to PyQt. Asher showed a demo of the working of his system. Right now it works only with a laptop/computer. RFID works like a charm. Hopefully RCOS will be able to use the system for taking attendance :) Stand alone system has some bugs and they are ironing out. Hopefully RFID will be rolled out soon. A lot of questions/suggestions were made by the students. 

Tom presented his Scrtiny system. He has been doing a lot oof back end job. He is trying to parallelize his back end to make it faster. He plans to have a nice gui to highlight the similarity and differences of programs. Tom plans to test out with instructors in programming intensive courses.

Prof. Malik gave an interesting tutorial on Machine learning. He peppered his talk with thought provoking questions and puzzles. He talked very briefly about supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforced learning. He also cautioned about overfitting data. He closed his talk posing  three challenging puzzles.

Damian, Austin and Chris talked about their Android project to help maintain schedules/classes/exams/how to get good grades etc. They have made substantial progress. They also have evenly divided their project among the three of them- It is an impressive achievement for any one - especially for a freshmen group. They plan to release a version by the end of this semester.

All the talks were excellent - as usual I learned a lot from listening to the talks as well insightful questions from other students.

Week 10 (11/6/2012) Fall 2012

Week 10 (11/6/2012) Fall 2012

The Fall semester is speeding along.  RCOS students had participated so many activities this semester (RPI Medalists Day, Admissions Open House, RCOS Hackathon, UPE Open Source Festival, NYState Hackathon, UPE Programming Competition, Entrepreneur of the year poster presentation) - a near burnt out feeling. Projects are coming along. 

This week we had four presentations:

1) Deon Robinson FreakAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

Deon has been progressing along. His project identifies the images and makes a semantic tags. He is working on the back end as of now. He is planning to test with a large number of images.

2) Jorge Jiminez (Guest Speaker) Ithos Global

Jorge works at a company on Government regulation for food suppliers and his company uses Open Source Software. His talk was to inform/educate the students of potential uses of their projects and to recruit bright students for their company.

3) Colin Rice David Vorrick  BitHopper http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

Colin and David briefly talked about their BitHopper project. David is working on the front end and Colin is working on the back end. Their project is coming along.

4) Ian Ooi  Big and CSTools   http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/big/  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cs-tools/

Ian talked about CSTools a helpful interactive guide for students to familiarize with programming, unix tools and other helpful hints. Ian is working on this project by himself. It is a noble project with an intention to help the students. He has made an initial dent in the project. He also talked about his summer project Big (an easy method to reinstall the system). He has completed most of it at least for some versions of linux  That needs a bit more testing and extension to other OS.

It is yet another hectic week and I am barely keeping my head above water!

Week 9 (10/30/2012) Fall 2012

Week 9 (10/30/2012) Fall  2012

The semester has been progressing along. There was a nice write up last week's open source festival in Poly newspaper  This week we had four talks.


1)  Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz RPIDirectory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

2) Colin Kuebler  Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

3) Stephen Silber, James McMillan and Colin Steiffel   RPI Mobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

4) Mike Agnew ReserveMe  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

Christian, Dan and Mike started of their recent updates in rpidirectory. These include suggestions for searches, new API, realtime pie chart and personalization. Please check out http://rpidirectory.appspot.com/ and see how cool it is. Mike has ported to Android with a new UI. Dan has done good backend improvements and Christian has taken care of teh whole project.

Colin presented his slides inside Koala - Colin has been making a lot of progress with a front end. He plans to rewrite his parser so that it is faster and flexible.

Stephen, James and Colin are progressing along RPIMobile. They are planning to release a version before the Spring Semester. Stephen has incorporated the Laundry Status. Stephen has registered RPI Mobile for TestFlight, a free Over-The-Air platform used to distribute beta and internal iOS applications to team members. James is using a server and scraped the athletic data - He is also planning to scrape the menu data and laundry status. Colin is working on making it portable to Android.

Mike talked about ReserveMe a project in reserving city parks and other information available to the community. This is a project is done in conjunction with the city of Schenectady. Mike has made progress with the user interface  http://agnewm.myrpi.org/reserveme/ - He has planned to use innodb and mysql for the backend. 

All in all it was a great afternoon and listened to great talks. Hope others will come forward by themselves (with out me twisting their arms or pulling their teeth :) ) to give talks!

Week 8 (10/23/2012) Fall 2012

Week 8 (10/23/2012) Fall 2012

We are more or less done with first round talks after this week. So we had 7 talks - It is very hard to summarize. All the projects are progressing along well. Many of them (talks 3, 5, 6 and 7) showed demos of their projects. There were active participation by other RCOS  students.  There are so many activities (a healthy sign) that foster creativity in and around RCOS. I am glad that I could partake in some of them.

The list of talks that was given are:

1) Dan Vegeto , Rebecca Nordhauser, Jesse Freitas  Collective Congress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

2) Ari Munic  RNA Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rna-simulation-with-simtk/

3) Sheena McNeil   koob kook - A reverse cookbook http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/

4) Zachary Jablons, Jerry Schneider Blue Mesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

5) Rachel Redner, Nick Timakondu, Asher Glick Zadatak Scheduler App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

6) Brian Barnes - RQ  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/

7) Zhixun Wang - Djinta  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

We are in the midway point of the semester. RCOS projects are going well and the students are spending time with courses and projects. This week we had two talks. We are glad to have a past RCOS student to come and give a talk. 

1. Jorel Lalici is working on CORSAIR According to Jorel "the software I am working on is instead focusing on facilitating freedom of speech in an academic setting. The intended use would be to share notes and materials for courses, as well as host an open discussion forum. CORSAIR has no public facing page, or server. The authentication server has no indication of what is on the server, and is only contacted as needed (if no nodes can be automatically discovered). As it is entirely p2p, it does not directly facilitate sharing of anything to the public. As CORSAIR actually significantly limits the scope of FreeNet (removing a lot of features and restricting the network to subnets), while merely adding a more user friendly interface tailored to use for academic materials, it actually removes much of the ability for CORSAIR to be misused." -  Knowing Jorel I am hopeful that CORSAIR will be useful not only to RPI community but to the whole free world.  There were many interesting questions and discussions to Jorel's talk.

BTW Jorel has a kickstarter campaign for his Piled Project. Here is the URL  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi?ref=card

2. John Britton who is working as a GitHub liaison with educational institutions gave a whirl wind tour of GitHub. As usual his presentation was lucid and crisp.  The students being intimately familiar with GitHub were able to understand every word of it. Further many interesting questions were asked.

We had an overflow of students listening to the talks in AE 216.

Week 6 (10/12/12) Fall 2012

Week 6 (10/12/12) Fall 2012

RCOS students on Open CS Day (10/13/12)

With a compressed week of 4 days (because of Columbus Day weekend), RCOS students accomplished in 4 days what could be accomplished in 5 days!. Please see RCOS students in Open house here https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.454650024577901.99346.194611683915071&type=1

We had a great set of talks presented this week.

1) Jorel Lalicki (actually a short presentation... makerfaire etc.) MakerFaire Trip report http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/9158

Jorel gave a presentation about his experiences in Maker Faire - Jorel had a great time and his project attracted around 500 visitors (including open hardware people, TI engineers and Startup firms). 

2) Beth Werbaneth Kinect Gesture Library http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kinect-gesture-library/

Beth's project is to build kinect library for motion sensing. Her project is coming along. Here is her youtube presentation
  

3) Bharath Santosh and Dimitry Dimitrov Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

Bharat gave a status update of his project - a simple system to learn propositional logic. The only operator is the cut operator. Using the operator, one can build any propositional logic expression. He has completed three of the four macro level constructs. Dimitri is working on GUI and Bharat is working on the backend - He is using javascript as an implementation language with rafael.js 
Bharat demoed his system.  There were interesting questions and suggestions from the participants.

4) Nick Pachulski Food Friend http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-friend/ 

Nick is making an IPhone and IPad application for buying groceries with limited budgets. Final goal is to make his system usable by fraternities. Nick is using Ruby on Rails. Nick has been making a steady progress. Since this is a large project, Nick may want to have some milestones for his own good.

5) Colin Rice bitHopper  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

Colin has been working on bitcoin. He has making substantial progress - currently his project involves pool jumping.

6) Shawn Denbow and Brendan Clark Dr. Memory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

Shawn and Brendan (freshman) are going strong with Dr. Memory. Shawn has already added many 64 DLL calls to Dr. memory.  Brendan is catching up with understanding Dr. memory.

7) Brendan Ashby - pLANer - Re-factored DB and GUI code. :) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/planer/

Brendan is concentrating on GUI and the data base. Brendan has made very good progress. Since he is the lone person working on his project.  he is restricting the scope the project. Brendan also showed a demo of his project.

Again I learned a lot from the students' presentations and questions and suggestions. 

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

RCOS Poster Presentation on Oct 5, 2012

Exams, Homework, Projects and RCOS are going in full swing for RCOS students. They have been doing an outstanding job so far.  Six groups of students gave a poster presentation during Enterpreneur of the year Celebration, We had our usual presentations and discussions during our weekly meeting.

 Zachary Clapper  on Penguin Electronics Management System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/ 

Zach gave a nice presentation on Electronics Inventory Management System.  Zach is working on the front end. Zach, being a JavaScript expert, rightly chose Javascript as his implementation language. There are a few other people working on this project. Please take a look at the blog written by http://penguin-electronics-inventory.blogspot.com/ Zach's presentation prompted a number of interesting suggestions and questions.

Remy Artega  (Servino Center) on Open Source Business Models 

Remy works with Servino Center and he is a serial enterpreneur. Remy gave an excellent presentation on the pitfalls of start up ( As he puts it, 90% of the start ups fail). Remy gave tips how to do a start up - Have a mock up, know the customer base and source of revenue. More importantly Remy suggested ways of starting open source business ventures. Many students expressed an interest.

David Vorick Blind64 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blind/

David talked about Bind64.  His program automates some of the tedious procedures involved with encoding using x264 (this is a video encoding program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264 ) x.264 is a successful free and open source program but it is tedious to use. Bind64 will free up some of the tediousness of these tasks.  There were interesting questions about whether a good documentation will be better than a program to simplify the tasks (I can only smile whether any one reads a documentation - one does not even read emails!)

As usual it is an enjoyable Friday late afternoon spent in the company of bright and eager minds.

Week 4 (9/25/2012) Fall 2012

Week 4 (9/25/2012) Fall 2012

We had a very successful Hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012) - For photos please see here
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.447073848668852.97468.194611683915071&type=1
(Thanks to Asher Glick for organizing it) With the result of a hackathon,the students made a fantastic progress as shown by the above snapshot ( 21 of the 26 projects updated!)

We had four talks this week,
1) Damian Mastylo, Austin Gulati, Chris Celi  The Collegiate
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-collegiate/

This group of freshmen talked about the collegiate where they are creating an Android App for
aggregating all the information needed for freshmean (including the schedule of classes, labs, when homeworks are due, when the exams are, when should they prepare for the exams, do the home works etc). They have made good progress with a few of these things already implemented (thanks to Hackathon as posted in their blog http://codequarry.net/2012/09/25/the-collegiate-gatorade-fueled-progress/ ). There were lively questions answer sessions afterwards and a lot of suggestions were given by upperclassmen.


2) Ken Zalewski '89 '91 Open Source in NY senate/Government

Next we had a talk from our alumni Ken Who works in the NY Senate dotCIo office in making the government transparent. As per his recollections, his talk included:  discussing some of their open source projects at the New York State Senate, including their Drupal-based website (NYSenate.gov), their Constituent Relationship Management system (based on CiviCRM.org), and their Java/Tomcat projects, which include OpenLegislation, SAGE (Senate Address Geocoding Engine), and BillBuzz.

There were lively questions from eager students which range from eliminating middle men and people utilizing the transparent form of government. It is worth mentioning (Thanks to Colin Sullivan '11) a TED video where Graylin Kim '11's work in the NYSenate and NYSenate work were mentioned in a TED talk (at 14:06 mark) in 
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html

3) Thomas Chestna Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

Next Tom talked about his plagiarism detection software called Scrutiny. Tom started working on this project (mentored and originally started by Rob Escriva '10) summer of 2011. Tom has made a fantastic progress and he is cleaning up the code and planning to conduct more tests. From the students attending the meeting, it looks like CS 2 may be utilizing his software for plagiarism detection software (among scrutiny's advantages include it being open source, setting up the threshold, and looking at the structure of the code than looking at the lexical level).

4. Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball, Mike Horowitz RPIDirectoryApp
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Finally Christian, Dan and Mike talked about improving their RPI Directory app to include all names, hosting in a non-cloud table (key value pairs) and  bring the statistics page. They are also planning to do additional information about the names (with the consent of the person). As we were running past 5:15 pm at this time, there were fewer questions. Many students talked to this group after the meeting.

All in all, it is a fantastic meeting, well presented talks and more importantly, RCOS students were willing to share their ideas and suggestions.

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Hackathon on September 22, 2012

All the RCOS application forms have been submitted to office of Undergraduate education. We have been picking up momentum and the students are active with doing their projects.  Thanks to Asher Glick, RCOS had a first hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012). Photo above was taken then.
We are officially in the Fall season.

Stephen Silber, James McM, Colin Steifel  RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

Stephen, James and Colin presented their progress with RPIMobile. IPhone portion of it has come along well. James is doing backend stuff and creating a SQLite data base. Colin is porting it to Android (he has just started). Asusual there were interesting questions and suggestions from the participant. Stephen showed a demo of his project (IPhone part)

Matt  Zanchelli  Sonar http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/

Matt updated about his two past project Cloud and Passcode..Passcode has been selected to be featured on Apple's Safari Extension Gallery.  Cloud piqued the interest of a start up!. Matt's current RCOS project is to write an easy to file bug reporter for Mac software. Matt has been progressing along.

Deon Robinson  FastAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

Deon has been working on linking Images to Data project for a while now. This is his official RCOS project this semester. The idea is to open source image and object recognition. The ultimate goal is to make augmented reality. You can read more about this  in his blog http://trymirage.blogspot.com/

Alex Freska, Patrick Teague, Brian Le, Jacob DeWitt   FlowUR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

Alex, Patrick, Brian and Jacob have been progressing with their FlowUr (Drawing flow charts). They are storing their flowcharts in SVG and most of the code is in Javascript and storing the charts in JSON format. They have a good routing algorithm. They have provided template mechanisms for others to make different drawings. They showed a demo. FlowUr project is progressing along well.

Thanks to Dr. Goldschmidt for writing last week's blogs. I should also appreciate all the mentors who re doing phenomenal things (along with their ambitious course loads and other activities).

I am honored to be associated with this group.

Week 2 Fall 2012 (9/11/2012)

Thanks as always to our mentors, Jerry and Asher, for running the show today.  We had a full docket of excellent speakers from across campus.  And, though it's not widely known yet, RCOS has new dedicated space in Amos Eaton -- three adjacent (and connected) offices on the second floor (205, 206, and 207).  This semester, we'll work on getting that space in shape for full RCOS use.  In fact, please email me your "laundry list" of wants/needs for that space and we'll see what we can do!

Our four talks were as follows:

1. Gary Schwartz opened the afternoon with an overview of his involvement with open source software in the dotCIO office (and beyond).  There are numerous projects, both old and new, going on within dotCIO here on campus, so don't hesitate to contact Gary with questions, ideas, etc.  And indeed, as Gary discussed, GitHub is the "cool" LinkedIn.  Any open source projects to data mine GitHub?

2. Professor Sibel Adali took time away from her new "Python in CSCI-1100" efforts to talk about open source needs in research, in particular for open data.  There are ridiculous amounts of data publicly available, including Twitter data -- and it's not just keyword-based techniques being used.  The network graphs can reveal interesting things about our online relationships and personalities.  Contact Prof. Adali if you'd like to get involved!

3. Kenley Cheung talked about open source successes and efforts in the Web Technologies Group, an agency of the RPI Student Senate formed in 2006.  Concerto is one of the most successful projects thus far, used throughout the world!  Get involved with the latest Concerto revision or new projects by contacting Kenley.

4. Finally, Colin Kuebler presented his Koala project, a language for the Web that sits on top of JavaScript. Colin showed off his very fancy and versatile user interface -- and it was suggested that the UI be extracted and submitted as a standalone open source GUI project.  Check out Colin's work at http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/ (and encourage him to prepare a presentation next time!).  :-)

Please continue to update your projects and blogs (i.e. let the RPI community and the world know what you're doing!).  And sign up for talks (via URL below).  Remember that talks are to show off some of your work, but also to garner feedback and ideas from your peers and mentors!

Talk sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmUFEZRUC23ddDg3bnF5Rnd3OHZNdFR6UkZjQUUxTFE&hl=en#gid=0

Week 1 Fall 2012 (9/3/2012)

Week 1 Fall 2012 (9/3/2012)

Eager to Code, Eager to Share and Eager to Help - Fall 2012

Actually this is the second week of the semester - we are still ironing out the meeting, project submissions and a lot of other details. Dr. David Goldschmidt will be joining as an expert adviser. Welcome David G! As usual we have a wonderful group of volunteers/mentors to help out. For the rest of this semester, we will be meeting in AE 216. If luck will have it, RCOS may have space - let us keep our fingers crossed!

We had three talks.

1. Jerry Schneider talked about his emulator project. http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-emulator-project/ Jerry has become an expert in web development/webapps after his summer internship.  He has implemented a chip 8 simulator using javascript and HTML5 (with CSS) (his other goal is to simulate Atari 2600).  He has implemented a number of games and other rcos-ists have contributed his project. he showed a demo and it looked awesome. Jerry also plans to continue with his BlueMesh project. 

2. Asher Glick talked about his BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/ - Asher is going for a big push with BriefCase - His project has attracted a number of students.  His ambition include code editor and presentation maker. All of them come with distributed editing. He has moved his git repo to a common place.

3. Jorel talked about his project with TILaunchpad http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/ He is closed to getting a kick started campaign. He and Tim are going to go to New York City for the maker faire http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html - They are having a booth with their  LaunchPad (hopefully coinciding with their kick started campaign).  Jorel gave an illuminating demo with LED and remotely controlled (pun intended).

We have an enthusiastic group and hope their enthusiasm turns into useful software/hardware projects.

12th week (8/10/2012) Summer 2012

12th week (8/10/2012) Summer 2012

We had our last group meeting this week.  We (students and I)  had a blast this summer.  The students had a fantastic commitment and it showed in their projects.

We had a record number of talks (we broke the record of last week) of talks. We went from noon to 2:00 p - most of the students stayed back to listen (the donuts, soda in addition to pizza helped a bit :) )

The presenters were:

1) Zachary Clapper Touch of Mathematics http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/touch-of-mathematics/

2) Dan Vegeto and Rob Hollinger Collective Congress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

3)  Jorel Lalici and Tim Cantwell TILaunchPad http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/



4)  Bobby Zheng Sage - geocoding http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sage-senate-address-geo-coding-engine/


5) Jim Kalfas Olympus http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/olympus/


6) Jeongmin Lee CubeBrowser

7) Brian Barnes RQ  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/ 

8) Alex Freska FlowUR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

9) Asher Glick BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

10) Ed Leslie Fenestra http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/fenestra/

11) Andrew Bolin  PortSim http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/portsim/

12) Kegham Khosdeghian and (Austin McGuire)  milkyway@home http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome/




With twelve talks, it is almost impossible to summarize these talks. I will try (like a fool!)

Zach has done his share (or will be at the end of summer) for MathTouch - His demo for algebra was nice (with history and redo/undo feature). Will be a useful tool for children in beginning Algebra

Dan and Rob showed an interesting demo of Collective Congress.  A very clever demonstration of the powers of their system (barring not sending the email) it work very nice. Students came up with good suggestions (string duplication and approximate string matching)

Jorel and Tim stole the floor with their final(4!) presentation. They are planning to start a kickstarter company. I was moved when gave me a LED name tag. Their website (opensource hardware) http://www.lib3.com/piled/ - Please support this company!

Bobby talked about his GeoCoder project using tiger data base. He has to do a nontrivial job splitting the  street names. He makes of Python shape libraries(?) and his code is (naturally) in python (still needs to compile!) . His program will connect to a Java program (front end)

Jim talked about Olympus front end contribution. His gui and a couple of plug-ins are working (a couple needs more work)

Jeonming has been making progress with his heath visualization (in semantic web) using twitter feed. He showed an excellent demo.

Brain talked about his project RQ. Q (queuing for his winamp) works. R (remote) part needs to be completed (hopefully will be done before the end of summer). He has posted his presentation slides here http://www.slideshare.net/BriGuy92/rq-second-presentation

Alex has been making a very good progress with his FlowUR project. he hopes to release the software before the end of summer. There are many good suggestions from students.

Asher has been making a good progress with his Briefcase project (he has a new syntax highlighter) - a number of students are interested in working on this project. He is breaking into front end and back end parts.

Ed showed his lightwieght windowing system based on X. It has a few bugs - otherwise works very well. He plans to port to other window manager (whose name I forget - a sort of competitor to ratpoison)

Andrew showed off his simulation of generating stock profile data (random). He plans to parse the real data file that he gt recently. Andrews progress is quite nice.

kegam spoke his Milkyway@home project. Kegam is trying to port n body simulation to GPU with double precision and Austin is doing nonintrusive visulizations. They are making excellent progress!

Whew - that is a whole lot of summary! It was an excellent semester and every one learned a ginormous amount! :)

Week 11 (8/3/2012) Summer 2012

Week 11 (8/3/2012) Summer 2012

As the summer semester is winding down, students are picking up the momentum. We had a record number of talks this week (which will be broken next week!)

The following are the speakers

1) Sean Chase BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

2) Amelia Peterson CircuitBox http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/circuitbox/

3) Mike Agnew BizNet http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ticket-terminal/

4) Ian Ooi Big http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/big/

5) Sheena McNeil koob ooc - reverse cookbook http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/

6) Zhixun Wang Djinta http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

7) Kevin Baker - RPID http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/

8) Steve Klenker Open Legislation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlegislation/

With so many talks, it is difficult to summarize. I will try my best

Sean has abandoned Bluetooth connection (BlueMesh) to PC - instead he is concentrating on Android BlueMesh  He has implemented sending messages to a specific android. He has taken care on the sending side of breaking large messages into smaller chunks.

Amelia has implemented time delay issues in the back end and added more digital devices. She also mastered OpenGL for gui front end for next semester.

Mike has implemented the form for items and designed the database and has implemented a GUI front end. He plans to continue working on next semester. Mike demonstrated working of his partial system.

Ian has implemented a sizable portion. All he needs to iron out all the bugs.

Zhixum has implemented both back end and the front end - There were a few bugs (resulting from scipy). He also demonstrated his system.

Kevin talked about  his RPI RFID hardware and software. He has already posted his talk slides here. Kevin also demonstrated his system and it looks pretty cool. He is trying to write an application which uses his hardware and software.

Finally Steve talked about his project on open legislation. He has a mock up how the search box looks lik. He has started implementing his system.

It was a hectic day - never the less a very pleasant one with lots of participation from students including Jerry Shneider who dropped by with donuts to boot!)

Week 9 Talk Videos Summer 2012

Week 9 Talk Videos Summer 2012

Thanks to Jorel we have talk videos of 9th week talk videos. Our youtube channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Please encourage these students and their outstanding motivation and commitment.

The presenters were

1. Priti,Kumar Rebecca Ehrhardt and Chelsea Poirier-Lightning Round 
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lightning-round/

2. Colin Neville Looking for a team http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/looking-for-team/

3. Austin McGuire, and Kegham Khosdeghian milkyway@home

Week 10 (7/27/2012) Summer 2012

Week 10 (7/27/2012) Summer 2012

Summer Semester is slowly winding down. In two weeks the summer semester will be over. Projects are coming along well.

This week we had three talks.

1. Stephen Silber rpimobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

 

 2. Thomas King SMS Vending Machine http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sms-sending-vending-machine/

3. Jorel Lalicki, Tim Cantwell LaunchPad Tutorial http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/

 

Stephen had made an excellent progress. He is well on to releasing his app before the end of the summer. He has been getting feedback from various sources including here

Thomas's first prototype has been installed in Ghana and the prototype has been working flawlessly (Thomas got a text message when some one purchased!). Since then Thomas has made substantial improvements in power consumption (10 fold decrease from 56 mA to 5.6mA by changing into a sleep mode from a busy wait loop). Thomas is waiting to hear more feedback when the team returns from Ghana.

Jorel and Tim have made an excellent progress What is more impressive is that they have also posted their talk slides! Please see them here. Jorel and Tim are also planning to start a company - please wait to hear further details. I am looking forward to getting some experience with their products!

Again I had a great time listening to a set of  great set of talks and a great set of questions 

Week 8 Talk Videos (Summer 2012)

Week 8 Talk Videos (Summer 2012)

Thanks to Jorel we have week 8 talk videos are available. http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1 is RCOS channel

1. Ed Leslie  Fenestra http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/fenestra/

2. Alex Freska - Flowur http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

3. Jeongmin Lee  DataCubeBrowser

4. Jorel Lalicki; Tim Cantwell  TILaunchpad Tutorial http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/

Week 9 (7/20/2012) Summer 2012

Week 9 (7/20/2012) Summer 2012

Cause - 7-18-2012

Effect 7-19-2012

Thanks to Asher, we had a successful hackathon on Wednesday (7/18/2012). The turnout was good, the food was better and the progress on the projects are the best - what more can I say.
Proof of the effect of the hackathon is shown above. (I am a firm believer of law of causality!) - this progress would not have been possible without a hackathon.

I have to thank mentors Jorel, Asher and Zach. They make my life extremely simple. With mentors like them RCOS can go a long way!

We had our usual talks this Friday (7/20/ 2012).

1. Priti,Kumar Rebecca Ehrhardt and Chelsea Poirier-Lightning Round http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lightning-round/

2. Colin Neville Looking for a team http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/looking-for-team/

3. Austin McGuire, and Kegham Khosdeghian milkyway@home

Priti, Rebecca and Chelsea have made phenomenal progress (not as ambitious as they originally planned) - never the less looks pretty impressive to me. They have implemented around 20 games (mostly based on history) - they even showed their demo - I need some time to play that game. All in all a quite impressive task.

Colin has been making a steady progress on Looking for a team. What is impressive was that he was able to take the suggestions presented during his first talk. Colin showed a demo of his system. (it is a preliminary version) - Colin is planning to improve his system (make it robust) and take feeds from github, linkedin and facebook to make the ratings reliable.

Austin and Kegham have been working on Milkyway@home project. Both of them are making an excellent proress. One is working on N-body simulation and the other is working on separation. Please see this website to know what is going on with this project http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/

Fabulous talks and a worthwhile afternoon to spend.

Videos of Talks presented during 6th Week

Bobby Zheng Chrnoicle http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chronicle/






Ian Ooi Big http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/big/



Silber RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/



Sheena McNeil koob kooc (Reverse of Cook Book) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/




King SMSVending Machine http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sms-sending-vending-machine/
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