Week 4 (9/25/2012) Fall 2012

Week 4 (9/25/2012) Fall 2012

We had a very successful Hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012) - For photos please see here
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.447073848668852.97468.194611683915071&type=1
(Thanks to Asher Glick for organizing it) With the result of a hackathon,the students made a fantastic progress as shown by the above snapshot ( 21 of the 26 projects updated!)

We had four talks this week,
1) Damian Mastylo, Austin Gulati, Chris Celi  The Collegiate
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-collegiate/

This group of freshmen talked about the collegiate where they are creating an Android App for
aggregating all the information needed for freshmean (including the schedule of classes, labs, when homeworks are due, when the exams are, when should they prepare for the exams, do the home works etc). They have made good progress with a few of these things already implemented (thanks to Hackathon as posted in their blog http://codequarry.net/2012/09/25/the-collegiate-gatorade-fueled-progress/ ). There were lively questions answer sessions afterwards and a lot of suggestions were given by upperclassmen.


2) Ken Zalewski '89 '91 Open Source in NY senate/Government

Next we had a talk from our alumni Ken Who works in the NY Senate dotCIo office in making the government transparent. As per his recollections, his talk included:  discussing some of their open source projects at the New York State Senate, including their Drupal-based website (NYSenate.gov), their Constituent Relationship Management system (based on CiviCRM.org), and their Java/Tomcat projects, which include OpenLegislation, SAGE (Senate Address Geocoding Engine), and BillBuzz.

There were lively questions from eager students which range from eliminating middle men and people utilizing the transparent form of government. It is worth mentioning (Thanks to Colin Sullivan '11) a TED video where Graylin Kim '11's work in the NYSenate and NYSenate work were mentioned in a TED talk (at 14:06 mark) in 
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html

3) Thomas Chestna Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

Next Tom talked about his plagiarism detection software called Scrutiny. Tom started working on this project (mentored and originally started by Rob Escriva '10) summer of 2011. Tom has made a fantastic progress and he is cleaning up the code and planning to conduct more tests. From the students attending the meeting, it looks like CS 2 may be utilizing his software for plagiarism detection software (among scrutiny's advantages include it being open source, setting up the threshold, and looking at the structure of the code than looking at the lexical level).

4. Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball, Mike Horowitz RPIDirectoryApp
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Finally Christian, Dan and Mike talked about improving their RPI Directory app to include all names, hosting in a non-cloud table (key value pairs) and  bring the statistics page. They are also planning to do additional information about the names (with the consent of the person). As we were running past 5:15 pm at this time, there were fewer questions. Many students talked to this group after the meeting.

All in all, it is a fantastic meeting, well presented talks and more importantly, RCOS students were willing to share their ideas and suggestions.

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Hackathon on September 22, 2012

All the RCOS application forms have been submitted to office of Undergraduate education. We have been picking up momentum and the students are active with doing their projects.  Thanks to Asher Glick, RCOS had a first hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012). Photo above was taken then.
We are officially in the Fall season.

Stephen Silber, James McM, Colin Steifel  RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

Stephen, James and Colin presented their progress with RPIMobile. IPhone portion of it has come along well. James is doing backend stuff and creating a SQLite data base. Colin is porting it to Android (he has just started). Asusual there were interesting questions and suggestions from the participant. Stephen showed a demo of his project (IPhone part)

Matt  Zanchelli  Sonar http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/

Matt updated about his two past project Cloud and Passcode..Passcode has been selected to be featured on Apple's Safari Extension Gallery.  Cloud piqued the interest of a start up!. Matt's current RCOS project is to write an easy to file bug reporter for Mac software. Matt has been progressing along.

Deon Robinson  FastAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

Deon has been working on linking Images to Data project for a while now. This is his official RCOS project this semester. The idea is to open source image and object recognition. The ultimate goal is to make augmented reality. You can read more about this  in his blog http://trymirage.blogspot.com/

Alex Freska, Patrick Teague, Brian Le, Jacob DeWitt   FlowUR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

Alex, Patrick, Brian and Jacob have been progressing with their FlowUr (Drawing flow charts). They are storing their flowcharts in SVG and most of the code is in Javascript and storing the charts in JSON format. They have a good routing algorithm. They have provided template mechanisms for others to make different drawings. They showed a demo. FlowUr project is progressing along well.

Thanks to Dr. Goldschmidt for writing last week's blogs. I should also appreciate all the mentors who re doing phenomenal things (along with their ambitious course loads and other activities).

I am honored to be associated with this group.

Week 2 Fall 2012 (9/11/2012)

Thanks as always to our mentors, Jerry and Asher, for running the show today.  We had a full docket of excellent speakers from across campus.  And, though it's not widely known yet, RCOS has new dedicated space in Amos Eaton -- three adjacent (and connected) offices on the second floor (205, 206, and 207).  This semester, we'll work on getting that space in shape for full RCOS use.  In fact, please email me your "laundry list" of wants/needs for that space and we'll see what we can do!

Our four talks were as follows:

1. Gary Schwartz opened the afternoon with an overview of his involvement with open source software in the dotCIO office (and beyond).  There are numerous projects, both old and new, going on within dotCIO here on campus, so don't hesitate to contact Gary with questions, ideas, etc.  And indeed, as Gary discussed, GitHub is the "cool" LinkedIn.  Any open source projects to data mine GitHub?

2. Professor Sibel Adali took time away from her new "Python in CSCI-1100" efforts to talk about open source needs in research, in particular for open data.  There are ridiculous amounts of data publicly available, including Twitter data -- and it's not just keyword-based techniques being used.  The network graphs can reveal interesting things about our online relationships and personalities.  Contact Prof. Adali if you'd like to get involved!

3. Kenley Cheung talked about open source successes and efforts in the Web Technologies Group, an agency of the RPI Student Senate formed in 2006.  Concerto is one of the most successful projects thus far, used throughout the world!  Get involved with the latest Concerto revision or new projects by contacting Kenley.

4. Finally, Colin Kuebler presented his Koala project, a language for the Web that sits on top of JavaScript. Colin showed off his very fancy and versatile user interface -- and it was suggested that the UI be extracted and submitted as a standalone open source GUI project.  Check out Colin's work at http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/ (and encourage him to prepare a presentation next time!).  :-)

Please continue to update your projects and blogs (i.e. let the RPI community and the world know what you're doing!).  And sign up for talks (via URL below).  Remember that talks are to show off some of your work, but also to garner feedback and ideas from your peers and mentors!

Talk sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmUFEZRUC23ddDg3bnF5Rnd3OHZNdFR6UkZjQUUxTFE&hl=en#gid=0

Week 1 Fall 2012 (9/3/2012)

Week 1 Fall 2012 (9/3/2012)

Eager to Code, Eager to Share and Eager to Help - Fall 2012

Actually this is the second week of the semester - we are still ironing out the meeting, project submissions and a lot of other details. Dr. David Goldschmidt will be joining as an expert adviser. Welcome David G! As usual we have a wonderful group of volunteers/mentors to help out. For the rest of this semester, we will be meeting in AE 216. If luck will have it, RCOS may have space - let us keep our fingers crossed!

We had three talks.

1. Jerry Schneider talked about his emulator project. http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-emulator-project/ Jerry has become an expert in web development/webapps after his summer internship.  He has implemented a chip 8 simulator using javascript and HTML5 (with CSS) (his other goal is to simulate Atari 2600).  He has implemented a number of games and other rcos-ists have contributed his project. he showed a demo and it looked awesome. Jerry also plans to continue with his BlueMesh project. 

2. Asher Glick talked about his BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/ - Asher is going for a big push with BriefCase - His project has attracted a number of students.  His ambition include code editor and presentation maker. All of them come with distributed editing. He has moved his git repo to a common place.

3. Jorel talked about his project with TILaunchpad http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/ He is closed to getting a kick started campaign. He and Tim are going to go to New York City for the maker faire http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html - They are having a booth with their  LaunchPad (hopefully coinciding with their kick started campaign).  Jorel gave an illuminating demo with LED and remotely controlled (pun intended).

We have an enthusiastic group and hope their enthusiasm turns into useful software/hardware projects.