Week 14 (4/27/2012) Spring Semester

Week 14 (4/27/2012) Spring Semester

Week 14 (4/27/2012) Spring Semester

Thanks to Asheesh of open-hatch we had a successful hackathon last Sunday. Patches were made to Django, Firefox and Sunshine by the group working on Sunday. Friday was the penultimate week of the Spring Semester. Students (and I too!) have been working hard.

This Friday we had the following presentations:

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

2) Dan Berkowitz, Brian Stauffer - Enstall http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/enstall/ 

3) Beth Werbaneth, Justin Renga, Griffin Milsap, Colin Neville - ReRoot  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reroot/

4)Zach Clapper - Touch of Maths  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/touch-of-mathematics/ 

Peter and Jeff probably gave their "last" RCOS talk. As usual they had an excellent presentation which I could emulate. Thee have progressed well with Geneis - IPhone  software update. Jeff designed and implemented the back end server mediation and Peter designed and implemented the front end.

Dan and Brian talked about Enstall  They have also divided into parts - one is working on the client side and another on the web front. They demoed a simple installation of a package. They have plans to complete the project for Fall Semester

Griffin, Justin, Colin  (Beth) talked about current status of ReRoot. They have a preliminary (first leve;) implementation. Some of their design choices led to problems in implementation. That made them to doa redesign and implement afresh. Griffin plans to do a second i implementation during th e coming summer. Justin and Griffin also discussed another project where clever use of threads are exploited.

Zach Clapper implemented history features in Touch Of Math. Work remains to make it stable, document and comment the code. Zach has also been working on two other projects, one with  driver display of RPI's auto racing team and to make the car change a gear using a switch.

Many students are involved a lot of projects beaside the RCOS projects. In a way it shows the diversity. On the other hand RCOS projects sometime take a back seat. If one takes education as a primary goal, one has to admire the students' diversity and tenacity to take on many projects and make many of them successful. even when their project do not succeed they learn a  valuable lesson

Week 13 (4/20/2012) Spring 2012

Serious Discussions




More Students at work




Taking a well earned break


Week 13 (4/20/2012) Spring 2012

What a delightful week it was - I was more or less in the state of nirvana (or eternal bliss) - we had rcos talks and presentations, hackathon with open hatch and classical Indian music concerts on Saturday and Sunday.

I will start off with hackathon. We had a room full of eager students sfrom various departments. Instructors were from members of Openhatch, RCOS student and from kitware. They had a well planned schedule on Saturday teaching us the social and technical aspects of sending patches to open software and to file bug reports. They had more r less one on session explaining the concepts. On Sunday the students were expected to contribute to existing open source project (I had to duck out because of earlier commitments).
I enjoyed and learned a lot (despite the fact I tend to forget everything so fast)
You can see from the photos above the other students are also enjoying. DeFazzios Pizza was awesome (a pretty upscale Pizza)

This week we had four talks:

1) Bharat Santosh, Michael Pomeran and Samuel Sandeen - Peirce Logic, http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

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

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

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

Bharat, Nichael and Samuel are continuing along with their project. They had a scheme for storing Proofs and an algorithm for testing similarity of proofs. Their front is progressing along well. Professor Bram van Heuveln was there asking probing questions. Professor Bram was eager to use this system in his future classes.

Jon and Alex talked about the status of their Android Math Notebook project. They have incorporated open source package Lipit OCR. They have also worked on the User Interface issues. Right now the main thing stopping is the speed of recognition. They plan to finish most of it before the middle of summer. They have psoted the slides in their blog - kudos to them. Here is link to their presentation

Matt talked about his new project where in he contributed to the open source software for presentation. Please see how cool is is presentation is - He too posted his slides of his presentation.

Bobby and Zach talked about their Chronicle project. Bobby is working on the Android front end where as Zach is working on the back end. Bobby has completed most of his tasks - There are some inherent limitations on the resolution of the video Zach needs a bit more time to complete the back end - creating data base and communicating with the front end.


A fantastic week - As the semester progresses the quality of the presentation seems to increase which was a very high level to start with!

Week 11 (4/13/2012) Spring Semester

Jeff Hui and Jinzhen Gong

Jeff Hui and Jinzhen Gong YACS

Jistin Renga

Justin Renga (ReRoot)

Christian Johnson and Mike Horowitz Horowitz

Christian Johnson and Mike Horowitz - RPI Directory



Week 11 (4/13/2012) Spring Semester

It has been a very hectic week - The above photos were taken from Undergraduate Research Symposium Poster Session. Students are working hard with a mountain of work load. We had four talks this week.

1) Alex Gaynor - PyPy + NumPy http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/numpy-for-pypy/

2) Christian J, Michael H, Luke D, Dan K DaBuzz
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dabuzz/ and http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/
RPI Directory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

3) Colin Rice - Distributed Hash Tables https://github.com/c00w/gevent-dht

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

Alex talked about how to write a fast interpreter in python for a subset of Javascript (without function) and dynamic data types. His interpreter produces a VM code and then gets compiled into a native code (using JIT compiler). He showed his interpreter code
https://bitbucket.org/alex_gaynor/example-vm and here https://bitbucket.org/pypy/example-interpreter/overview . His interpreter performance though was not measured seems to run pretty fast.

Christian, Dan, Mike (and Luke) talked about DaBuzz. Their project was a bit ambitious: scrapping websites, parsing (natural language processing) and analyzing sentiment and then using it for further analysis. They have been steadily progressing in all fronts. They have been scrapping specific sites and have a web application to measure the sentiment. They have a web application to get user input/analysis of the websites (useful for learning). It was quite impressive what they have accomplished. They have also continued their RPIDirectory - They moved the database to the cloud and made an omni search (searching for various fields). Their stats page based on RPI directory is quite informative. Please take a look at here http://rpidirectory.appspot.com/stats

Colin Rice was kind enought o give a talk on his project on Distributed Hash Table. He contrasted his approach with Chord a system introduced at MIT . Colin has built his system based on heuristics and hence does not have a guaranteed average case performance. Nevertheless his system performs reasonably well in practice and has many users.

Finally Alex, Patrick and Brian talked about their Flowur project on sharing flow charts. They are currently working on exchange formats for their flowcharts. There is also a web front end for sharing flow charts. Currently they use Flash to display their flow charts. Eventually they are planning to move to HTML 5 and java script. Their progress has been pretty good.


They were delightful presentations, with wonderful student participation with probing questions. What more a teacher wants on a late Friday afternoon

Week 10 (4/6/2012) Spring 2012 Videos of Talks

Week 10 (4/6/2012) Videos of talks

Thanks to Jorel for taking and uploading videos. Thanks to Peter for the photos taken during Undergraduate Researvh Symposium Dinner.

1) Shawn Denow on Dr.Memory




2) Colin Rice on Bit Hopper



3) Jinzhen Gong and jeff Hui on YACS





All of them are excellent talk. Please listen and enjoy

Week 10 (4/6/2012) Spring 2012

Week 10 (4/6/2012) Spring Semester

We had yet another hectic week - On Wednesday, we had Undergraduate Research Symposium. RCOS was well represented in poster sessions as well oral presentations (at least 4 in each category). I had hard time in recognizing most of them as they are well suited(!), tied(!) and dressed. :)

On Friday we had a phantom "fireworks" (false fire alarm in JEC with 7 or 8 fire engines coming to help) just before our talks started. All of the students have to go out and brave the cold wind blowing across. To start with we did not have many students (as many of them left for Easter Holidays) and the fire drill drove a few back home. A few, proud ones remained and we had our own "fireworks" of talks!.

This week, we had three talks.

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

2) Colin Rice - BitHopper http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

3) Jinzhen Gong, Jeff Hui - Yacs http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/timetable/

Shawn is doing a meticulous job of reverse engineering system calls. He is documenting the calls API. He has almost completed his original goal.

Colin is cleaning up his server code and doing it in a separate branch. His software is used by many (quite a few - the actual count is unknown)

Jinzhen (and Jeff) talked about their YACS 2 release. They have one developer to help them with their project. The statistics (of their software usage) they showed is pretty impressive.

With the semester slowly winding down, every one is busy with school work and other end of the year activities. I am impressed with all the work RCOS students are doing.

9th week Talk Videos Spring 2012

9th week Talk Videos Spring 2012

Thanks to Jorel, we have videos of talks presented during 9th week. We have had busy two weeks - there were many Talks, presentations and Posters besides our usual quota of home works, exams, projects. We all survived that!

We had two talks

1) Jerry Schneider, Trevor Zettersten, Sean Chase on Blue Mesh,

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/


The talk video may be found here:




2) John Wason's talk on Robotics - Recruiting for projects. This is John Wen's Lab




3) Asher Glick and Elizaeth Towns on Briefcase,

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

Week 9 (3/30/2012) Spring 2012

Week 9 (3/30/2012) Spring 2012




Just confirming this is indeed spring semester with flowers blooming and with a sudden spurt of too many happenings in and around the campus. On Thursday, there is an open source festival at SUNY Albany Campus, across the river. There were quite a few talks by open source exponents and leaders in industry, government and students. Our own (RCOS students) Asher Glick, Eliazabeth Townes presented on Briefcase and Dan Vegeto presented a talk on Collective Congress. The Suny Albany Schedule can be seen here and here. With Programming Competition, Undergraduate Research Symposium, Accepted Students Day, and (of course never ending) projects, home works and exams students are extremely busy. Faculty members (including me) have to attend Thesis exams, graduate admissions, advising, course registration and (never ending) tasks of giving home works, projects and tests!

With that background, it may be obvious why we had only two talks this week. The quantity of talks may be low, but the quality is sky high!

This week we had two student talks and a gust talk by John Wesson.

1) Jerry Schneider, Trevor Zettersten, Sean Chase on Blue Mesh,

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

2) Asher Glick and Elizaeth Towns on Briefcase,

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/


Jerry, Sean and Trevor have most of their completed. They have written a beautiful blog post explaining how to use their API. Jerry and Sean also demonstrated their slides application. They are still cleaning out the last bugs. There may be some inherent limitations on the distance and the size of blue tooth.

Asher and Beth presented their Briefcase project. They have made a lot of changes but not pushed for production as they were having series of presentation. Beth is working on the back-end where as Asher is working on the front end and the overall system architecture. One of the things that they have worked on is the atomicity of operation for concurrent updates.

Dr. John Wesson (Guest speaker from Robotics Group at RPI) talked about their projects and solicited students to work on their projects.

I am pleased to have spent Friday afternoon in the company of such bright and energetic students!