Week 1 (5/25/2012) Summer 2012

Week 1 (5/25/2012) Summer 2012

Thanks to our donor Mr. Sean O' Sullivan '85 RCOS URP projects for the summer 2012 has started with a bang. We have around 35 students working on various projects - highest among summer semester of past years. Being the memorial day weekend, many students took the Friday(or the week off)- Still we had a sizable attendance on Friday.  Saturday 26th May , RPI had its  commencement. Very pleased to see many former RCOS students walk across the stage to receive their diplomas. Hope these students will keep in touch with current and future RCOS students and provide guidance and suggestions.

This week we had three talks.

1) Asher Glick (lead Mentor)

2) Michael Agnew on Ticket Terminal  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ticket-terminal/

3) Moorthy

Asher gave an over view of Observatory and its various features Asher, being an expert at software version control GI, volunteered to help out with GIT and its nuances.

Micahel Agnew talked about his project Ticket Terminal (http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ticket-terminal/) his summer RCOS project. His project is to provide an open source platform (with  as many features as he could develop this summer) for buying and selling tickets. He has started his project - Plans to use jQuery and PHP and mySQL as his database.

I gave my usual talk requesting them to learn new technology and science and apply them to practical problems of social importance.  My slides may be found here.

Week 15 (5/4/2012) Spring Semester

Week 15 (5/4/2012) Spring Semester

Spring 2012 Last week Group Photo (5/4/2012)

Graduating Seniors And Helpful too

This is it - The last week of RCOS meeting for the Spring 2012 and last meeting for graduating seniors. We had a fantastic semester (I can repeat like a parrot saying that RCOS students are great and hope at least some one pay attention to the work being done by the students).

We had 5 students making a presentation this week

1) Dan Vegeto - Collective Congress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

2) Jorel Lalicki, Monica Kosciuk - PICTOSS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pictoss/

3)  Chris Gizara, Mike Heise, Frank Kotarski -UnMake http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/unmake/

4) Sunil Kunnakkat, Brian Barnes - Android Music Sampler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/android-music-sampler/

5) Matthew McMullen, Amelia Peterson-  Open Circuit Sim http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-circuit-sim/

And the videos of talks are getting uploaded in youtube in our youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1  (Thank you  to Jorel)

Dan Vegeto was making a steady progress and he showed a demo of his voting system. He plans to work during the summer to finish off his project.

Jorel and Monica are making a steady progress with their PICTOSS system to produce gcode for their milling machine. Most of it is working (no optimization of g code and no scaling feature yet)
They plan to finish ther system before the beginning of summer.

Mike and Frank were able to accomplish a great deal with their Unmake system. They showed a demo of their system and they were able to make emacs  and vim in a few seconds. Their back-end is generating CMAKE and they have split up the analytic to make their system efficient. They plan to make further improvements over the summer.

Sunil and Brian are making a steady progress with Android Music Sampler. Their code has not yet been pushed. There were a lot of interesting suggestions from the audience about their project.

Matthew and Amelia talked about their progress with Open Circuit SIm -  Amelia is working on the back-end and Matthew is working with open GL for the front end - These two yet are yet to be connected. According it will be done soon. Matthew and Amelia also talked about their second project for fast rendering of game objects. They have a student collaborator from Temple University. It looks that the students are involved many more projects.

I am very impressed with the quality of the projects and dedication of the students. More importantly the students are willing to help out each other and are willing to help any open source project. I am really proud of this and I am privileged to be associated with them,