Week 8 (10/23/2012) Fall 2012

Week 8 (10/23/2012) Fall 2012

We are more or less done with first round talks after this week. So we had 7 talks - It is very hard to summarize. All the projects are progressing along well. Many of them (talks 3, 5, 6 and 7) showed demos of their projects. There were active participation by other RCOS  students.  There are so many activities (a healthy sign) that foster creativity in and around RCOS. I am glad that I could partake in some of them.

The list of talks that was given are:

1) Dan Vegeto , Rebecca Nordhauser, Jesse Freitas  Collective Congress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

2) Ari Munic  RNA Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rna-simulation-with-simtk/

3) Sheena McNeil   koob kook - A reverse cookbook http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/

4) Zachary Jablons, Jerry Schneider Blue Mesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

5) Rachel Redner, Nick Timakondu, Asher Glick Zadatak Scheduler App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

6) Brian Barnes - RQ  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/

7) Zhixun Wang - Djinta  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

We are in the midway point of the semester. RCOS projects are going well and the students are spending time with courses and projects. This week we had two talks. We are glad to have a past RCOS student to come and give a talk. 

1. Jorel Lalici is working on CORSAIR According to Jorel "the software I am working on is instead focusing on facilitating freedom of speech in an academic setting. The intended use would be to share notes and materials for courses, as well as host an open discussion forum. CORSAIR has no public facing page, or server. The authentication server has no indication of what is on the server, and is only contacted as needed (if no nodes can be automatically discovered). As it is entirely p2p, it does not directly facilitate sharing of anything to the public. As CORSAIR actually significantly limits the scope of FreeNet (removing a lot of features and restricting the network to subnets), while merely adding a more user friendly interface tailored to use for academic materials, it actually removes much of the ability for CORSAIR to be misused." -  Knowing Jorel I am hopeful that CORSAIR will be useful not only to RPI community but to the whole free world.  There were many interesting questions and discussions to Jorel's talk.

BTW Jorel has a kickstarter campaign for his Piled Project. Here is the URL  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi?ref=card

2. John Britton who is working as a GitHub liaison with educational institutions gave a whirl wind tour of GitHub. As usual his presentation was lucid and crisp.  The students being intimately familiar with GitHub were able to understand every word of it. Further many interesting questions were asked.

We had an overflow of students listening to the talks in AE 216.

Week 6 (10/12/12) Fall 2012

Week 6 (10/12/12) Fall 2012

RCOS students on Open CS Day (10/13/12)

With a compressed week of 4 days (because of Columbus Day weekend), RCOS students accomplished in 4 days what could be accomplished in 5 days!. Please see RCOS students in Open house here https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.454650024577901.99346.194611683915071&type=1

We had a great set of talks presented this week.

1) Jorel Lalicki (actually a short presentation... makerfaire etc.) MakerFaire Trip report http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/9158

Jorel gave a presentation about his experiences in Maker Faire - Jorel had a great time and his project attracted around 500 visitors (including open hardware people, TI engineers and Startup firms). 

2) Beth Werbaneth Kinect Gesture Library http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kinect-gesture-library/

Beth's project is to build kinect library for motion sensing. Her project is coming along. Here is her youtube presentation
  

3) Bharath Santosh and Dimitry Dimitrov Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

Bharat gave a status update of his project - a simple system to learn propositional logic. The only operator is the cut operator. Using the operator, one can build any propositional logic expression. He has completed three of the four macro level constructs. Dimitri is working on GUI and Bharat is working on the backend - He is using javascript as an implementation language with rafael.js 
Bharat demoed his system.  There were interesting questions and suggestions from the participants.

4) Nick Pachulski Food Friend http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-friend/ 

Nick is making an IPhone and IPad application for buying groceries with limited budgets. Final goal is to make his system usable by fraternities. Nick is using Ruby on Rails. Nick has been making a steady progress. Since this is a large project, Nick may want to have some milestones for his own good.

5) Colin Rice bitHopper  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

Colin has been working on bitcoin. He has making substantial progress - currently his project involves pool jumping.

6) Shawn Denbow and Brendan Clark Dr. Memory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

Shawn and Brendan (freshman) are going strong with Dr. Memory. Shawn has already added many 64 DLL calls to Dr. memory.  Brendan is catching up with understanding Dr. memory.

7) Brendan Ashby - pLANer - Re-factored DB and GUI code. :) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/planer/

Brendan is concentrating on GUI and the data base. Brendan has made very good progress. Since he is the lone person working on his project.  he is restricting the scope the project. Brendan also showed a demo of his project.

Again I learned a lot from the students' presentations and questions and suggestions. 

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

RCOS Poster Presentation on Oct 5, 2012

Exams, Homework, Projects and RCOS are going in full swing for RCOS students. They have been doing an outstanding job so far.  Six groups of students gave a poster presentation during Enterpreneur of the year Celebration, We had our usual presentations and discussions during our weekly meeting.

 Zachary Clapper  on Penguin Electronics Management System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/ 

Zach gave a nice presentation on Electronics Inventory Management System.  Zach is working on the front end. Zach, being a JavaScript expert, rightly chose Javascript as his implementation language. There are a few other people working on this project. Please take a look at the blog written by http://penguin-electronics-inventory.blogspot.com/ Zach's presentation prompted a number of interesting suggestions and questions.

Remy Artega  (Servino Center) on Open Source Business Models 

Remy works with Servino Center and he is a serial enterpreneur. Remy gave an excellent presentation on the pitfalls of start up ( As he puts it, 90% of the start ups fail). Remy gave tips how to do a start up - Have a mock up, know the customer base and source of revenue. More importantly Remy suggested ways of starting open source business ventures. Many students expressed an interest.

David Vorick Blind64 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blind/

David talked about Bind64.  His program automates some of the tedious procedures involved with encoding using x264 (this is a video encoding program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264 ) x.264 is a successful free and open source program but it is tedious to use. Bind64 will free up some of the tediousness of these tasks.  There were interesting questions about whether a good documentation will be better than a program to simplify the tasks (I can only smile whether any one reads a documentation - one does not even read emails!)

As usual it is an enjoyable Friday late afternoon spent in the company of bright and eager minds.