Week 3 (2/10/2012) Spring 2012

Week 3 (2/10/2012) Spring 2012

RCOS has been going strong. We have a lot of students participating at RCOS - more than that they are very enthusiastic on coding.

This week, we had five talks

1) Jerry, Shawn and Trevor on BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

2) Asher and Beth on BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

3) Christian, Dan, Mike and Luke on DaBuzz http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dabuzz/

4)Colin Kuebler on Syntax Highlighter http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

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



After the group photo was taken, we got down to talks.

Jerry, Trevor and Shawn talked about their Blue Mesh Project. They have redesigned the project (their project uses polling) and implemented most of it. They are still testing. Jerry and Trevor are doing the back end, having blue mesh connection and Shawn is developing applications. Because it is based blue mesh, the system users have to be with in 20' of each other. There were a lot of penetrating questions by the students as well as excellent suggestions.

Asher and Beth continue to work on Briefcase, an open source version of Google Docs (for spread sheets). Beth is working on the backend (using Djanago and a data base) and Asher is working on the front end. The client code allows users to write API's (Zach Clapper has developed Math Javascript libraries). Colin Kuebler is helping with Syntax highlighting. They are also developing an open source code collaborative tool.

Christian, Dan, Mike and Luke talked about DaBuzz, is an application to gauge the market's perception of the stock market. They have to select which financial articles to scrape, to do sentiment analysis using NLTK, to select which stocks to
analyze and use machine learning to further refine and have a web front end and cloud storage. It is a daunting task and with four talented students working, I am confident that good software will come out of this.

Colin talked about syntax highlighting. He uses regular expressions to identify tokens. Colin uses a clever algorithm to recompute only the selected code that has changed since. Colin uses this syntax highlighting for his project on Koala. COlin gave a demo of his system and it works pretty fast.

Colin Rice, talked about his project BitHopper about how to make money from BitCoin. Even though this is Colin's first RCOS project, he has already established himself a great open source devloper and has a large following. Colin has developed his software based on sound mathematical ideas and clever algorithms. There were a few questions mostly about ethics and the algorithms used by Colin.

Overall, it is a fantastic set of first talks by the students. Hope this continues for the rest of the semester.