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!