Week 5 Spring 2012 (2/24/2012)

Week 5 Spring 2012 (2/24/2012)

This is the first time (during my career at RPI), we truly have a spring semester (not a winter semester disguised as a spring semester!) The students at RCOS are doing great work - all their projects progress reports have green and smiley faces and their presentations have been excellent. Hope I am hoodwinked :).

This week we had four more excellent presentations:

1) Peter Hajas, Jeff Hui - Genesis http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/genesis/

2) Alex Hunt/ Jon Kriss, Android Math Notebook http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/android-math-notebook/

3) Matt Zanchelli -Blog.txt http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blogtxt/


Safari Passcode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/safari-passcode/

4) Zach Fry, Bobby Zheng - Chronicle http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chronicle/

Peter and Jeff gave their excellent presentation on Genesis - an IPhone application to be on the road editor for code to fix "mission critical" bugs on the road. They have already implemented part of their system and showed a demo. Peter talked about the front end of the system (including code highlighter, on the fly editing) and Jeff talked about the backend - how genesis communicates with outside world. As usual there were interesting questions and good suggestions from the audience.

Alex and Jonathan talked about Android Math Notebook. Their project is to enable taking (math) notes online easy. They are using one source handwriting toolkit for hand written recognition. This will be critical for the success of their project (both in terms of speed and accuracy). By making this an external module, they can concentrate on other things. They have implemented a gui. They are progressing quite well. Hoping to see great things from this accomplished group.

Matt Z is the next speaker. He is a freshman and he exudes an infectious enthusiasm that others could emulate. He talked about three projects. He has implemented a customizable password using master password in Safari. It is implemented in Javascript.
Matt gave a demo of his project. Matt Z is making sure that the security of these passwords are not compromised.

Then he talked about his other project blog.txt - It is the "easiest" blog writing system. When a plain text is dropped into his program, it is nicely formatted and a blog appears. Matt gave a demo of this system too. He is currently trying to enhance this software to do "more" things easily. Matt Z also briefly talked about his third project on cloud system. It is still in the design stage.

Bobby (and Zach) talked about their Chronicle System. Their system (based on android) will enable video taping lectures, tagging the segments and searching. They have implemented some of the components of their system. Rigt now, their design is based on wifi for bandwidth reasons. Hoping to see great progress in their useful (to all of the students) system.

All the presentation were well thought out and well delivered. All the projects have users in mind in their design. I hope that these projects take off big and have the largest user base.