Had a Blast - Last Blog Post for a while Summer 2013 7-29-2013

When I joined RCOS 6 years ago, little did I know it will have such a profound effect on me. Being associated with such bright, helpful and motivated students was the highlight of my professional career (on n years) at RPI. The diversity, originality and creativity among students have to be seen to be believed.

The hackathon at The center of gravity was a blast. Here was a octocopter demo in Uncle Sam Garage

I could cite achievements and other noteworthy adaptation of our software in various places. If I were to do that, I would be yet another bean counter! The peer mentors, group decisions about etiquette, healthy competition among projects were some of the reasons RCOS made a difference in every one.

We all have to thank Mr. Sean O'Sullivan '85 for his generous donation that made all this possible. I am also thankful to Dr. Raj Raghuram, Dr. TV Raman and Dr. Robert Ingalls who encouraged me when I had doubts. Dr. Janaki Krishnamoorthy and Raju Krishnamoorthy kept me sane (or tried their best) when I was going the deep end. Support by the administrative staff is also highly appreciated.

Hope to return to see a better and improved RCOS in Fall 2014.

Memories! Memories!! Memories!!!

Week 15 (5/7/2013) and (5/10/2013) Spring Semester

Week 15 (5/7/2013) and (5/10/2013) Spring Semester

This is the last week of the semester. We had two meetings this week - on Tuesday and on Friday.

On Tuesday Rob Escriva '10 (and a current graduate student at Cornell University) talked about HyperDex  http://hyperdex.org/ and his Github repsotiry is in  https://github.com/rescrv/HyperDex Hyperdex is a nosql key value store which supports atomic transactions, consistency, atomicity and durability. Rob gave a lucid presentation and topped with a demo. Rob also demonstrated the high performance of HyperDex on sample data sets and queries. Rob's talk was well attended and students asked a number of pertinent questions.

On Friday we had student presentations giving their second rounds of talks.

  

1) Jordan Yamada, Bharath Santhosh - Alfred - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alfred/

2)  Andrew Karnani, Vera Axelrod , Colin Steifel - YAExS - Yet Another Exam Scheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/yet-another-exam-scheduler-yaexs/

3) Alex Freska, Ian McLoughlin - Flowur http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

4)  Joshua Makinen, Steven Hammar - Resistance Color Scanner - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/resistance-color-scanner/

5) Austin McGuire, Kevin Fung, Tianyi Chen, Daniel Fellzardo - Rate My Stream

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rate-my-stream/

Jordan Bharath and Kyle talked about the current status of Alfred and their progress on it. One of the group members will be working during Summer to complete.

Andrew, Vera and Colin talked about their progress and problems in YAExS. One of the difficulties was with the library they used and the other was getting the relevant data.

Alex and Ian talked about Flowur. They had some minor problem with Layout. Alex is planning to work during summer to release a version. Ian will be working with RCOS on ThreeD layout.

Joshua and Steven talked about resistance color scanner. They spent time in learning development tools for Andoid. They also developed a prototype Python program to get the resistance color scanner working. They learnt about openCV (thanks to Bharath) and they plan to develop Android application during summer.

Austin, Kevin Daniel (and) Tianyi talked about RateMyStream project. Since they divided their project they resulted both useful ad hurt their progress. Resolving an authentication bug took some time. They learned a lot in doing this project.

We had a fantastic semester. I might have learned more than what students might have learned.

It was a great semester and a learning expereince.

Week 12 (4/16/2013) Spring 2013

Week 12 (4/16/2013) Spring 2013

With the Grand Marshal week behind, we are in the final stretch of the semester. We had our usual set of fine speakers.

1)  Stephen Silber and Steven Perkins RPIMoble  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

2) Christian Johnson RPI Directory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

3) Ethan Bond, Raymond Jacobson Instant Dropbox Syracuse Hackathon

4)  Diogo Moitinho de Almeida, Bharath Santosh, Zach Jablons,  Puckmen in Kaggle Compettion

5) Diogo Moitinho de Almeida, Bharath Santosh ProtoML http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/protoml/

6) Tim McMullen, Awesome Wav http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/awesome-wav/

Stephen and Steve talked about their ongoing RPIMobile project. They have been progressing along. With UPE's server, they are planning to have their version in AppStore. Recent improvements include a nice event notifier, and an improved campus map with pins. They showed a demo of their system.

Christian resolved/helped fix the bug with google app-engine API. RPIDirectory is functioning again. Christian has incorporated a cool PhotoMap feature. You can check out here in http://rpidirectory.appspot.com/photomap

Ethan and Raymond talked about their experiences in participating in a hackathon in Syracuse. They won the second prize and a raspberry pi.  Their project involved an implementation of a fast drop box like feature for sharing (one need not download drop box) and just share an url. They implemented the whole system in a day (using ruby on rails)

Diogo, Bharath and Zach talked about their experiences in kaggle http://www.kaggle.com/ competition (machine learning) recently. They have decided the blue book value of bulldozers based the past data. they talked about their different techniques, what caused problems, and about bad data. Despite all this, the team puckman finished 101th among 478 teams  

http://www.kaggle.com/c/bluebook-for-bulldozers/leaderboard  (They slipped from the previous position of 27)

Diogo, Bharath also talked about their RCOS project ProtoML - They used many of the features of PortoML for their Kaggles competition. They showed a demo of their system.

Tim talked about his successful efforts in covering his steganography program Awesome Wav to work using threads. He showed a demo of his system. Tim has to resort to using PThreads for threads. Tim elaborated  his difficulties with the file i/o and how he resolved most of them.

As usual there were many interesting questions and suggestions. It was a great learning expereience for me as usual. I will be missing this next two weeks.

Week 11 (4/9/2013) Spring 2013

Week 11 (4/9/2013) Spring 2013

Last week was an action packed week will be an understatement - With spring weather teasing us and end of the semester looming up on us,  our hands were full with activities. One of the high lights among many  was the use rpi-rfid reader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/  to take attendance.  And of course Alfred  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alfred/ was on display during accepted students day. I will be remiss if I did not mention the cool rcos cube (image above) with rcos on sides and an open hardware and one software other two sides (Thanks Jorel for designing and making the cube). We have our usual talks by the students

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

2) Mike Agnew - Schenectady Online Reservation System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

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

4) Austin Gulati - University Hacker Olympics

5) Chris Celi - Topsoil  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/topsoil/

6) Jorel Lalick, Monica Kosciuk, Justin Jones, Jonah Gruber, Brian Barnes OpenSourceSpectrometer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-spectrometer/

Matt has been doing a lot of cool and interesting projects.  His muting system announcemnets (like email notification in Macs) is a very cool project. I will not be able to give adequate justification of his projects by writing tidbits.  He has posted his slides here - Please read it. It is awesome and  his demos were impressive.

Mike has been progressing with his PermitMe/ReserveMe . Mike has met with Schenectady municipal officials. Mike has a simple UI and he has been making use of twitter bootstrap.  Mike hopes to release his system before summer.

Shawn and Brendan have made a lot of progress with Dr. Memory. Shawn is working on system calls for win 32 and Brendan has been documenting the system calls.

Austin briefly talked about the advantages of participating Hacker Olympics (He participated last year). Hacker Olympics (local chapter) was held yesterday (April 13, 2013)

Chris has been making progress with his idea sharing/growing project. He has implemented most of his work (using Ruby on Rails)

Jorel, Jusin, Jonah, Brian and (Monica) talked about their Open Source Hardware/Software Spectrometer. They have made prototype using arduino. They were able to get good results so far. Many high schools are interested in their spectrometer.

It has been a tremendous educational experience for me  Both presentations and questions were excellent. It was a well spent Tuesday evening as usual.

 

Week 10 (4/2/2013) Spring 2013

Week 10 (4/2/2013)  Spring 2013

We have been progressing along and we are already on tenth week of the spring semester. It has also been very hectic - with the undergraduate symposium on Wednesday 4/3/2013. (we had 4 talks and 4 poster presentations from RCOS). 

We had two guest presentations and four students presentations.

1) Prof. Jason Kuruzovich (Guest speaker)

2)  Corey Leveen (Guest Speaker)

3) David Vorrick, Forest Trimble, Luke Champine, Sean Moran and Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi  Mkvsynth http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mkvsynth/

4) Colin Rice - Bit Toll  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bittoll/

5) Colin Kuebler - Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

6) Tor Hagemann - libalexandria http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/libalexandria/

Jason talked about collaboration of RCOS and Servino center. Already many RCOS students participate with Servino center and the students.   He also encouraged RCOS students to participate in hackathon in Syracuse (NY) this Saturday. Also he was instrumental in adapting Observatory (dashboard software developed by former RCOS members Nate Stedman, Colin Sullivan and Tim Horton) for Foundry (Servino center). David Goldschmidt is on top of this collaborative effort.

Corey talked about his start up MuchMunch and pitched a CTO position for RCOS students.
You can see details about munch munch here  and its website is here

David, Forest, Luke, Sean and Wyler talked about their progress on video editor for linux operating systems. David has made progress on the back end.  The script end is going on well. The gui is also progressing well - They have almost demoed their system.

Colin R gave a scintillating practice talk (practice talk) for his UGRS presentation. Colin has progressed greatly and he gave a fantastic presentation. Colin R has used Haskell for implementation. He has almost completed his project.

Colin K has been working on web chat for programmers using Javascipt (and node.js) - He demoed his system. Colin will eventually integrate this in his Koala system. This will enable easier co-operation among novice/inexperienced programmers.

Tor talked about his libAlexandria project. Tor has more or less completed his libraries. Currently he has been hoping others will use his library for machine learning tasks.

As usual we had a fascinating session with lots of interesting participation/questions/suggestions from students. As usual I learned a lot.

Week 9 (3/29/2013) Spring 2013

Week 9 (3/29/2013) Spring 2013

Semester is going in full steam and the seniors are eager to graduate and the rest are thinking of their summer internship. As usual all of them want to finish their exams/projects and working hard towards that.

We have our usual talks. The following students presented their talks

1) Rachael Redner, Nick Timakondu and Asher  Glick Zadatak http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

2) Scott Silber, Stephen Perkins RPI Mobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/


3) Alex Freska, (Ian Mcloughlin - where are you in Observatory dashboard) FlowUR  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

4) Jordan Yamada and Bharath Santhosh Alfred http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alfred

Rachael, Nick and Asher talked about Zadatak. Rachael is working on a new GUI for their application (in Android). She showed a nice demo of that. Nick is working on scheduling (back end) - He ran into some difficulties (algorithmic) and he has found a way to overcome. Asher is working on the interface between front and back ends. They expect an alpha release by the end of this semester.

Scott and Stephen talked about their RPI Mobile. They are progressing along well. They plan to include events. Steve is working on the server side (extending James McM's contribution).  UPE has promised to provide the servers for hosting their persistent data.

Alex and Ian talked about FlowUR. Their project is going smoothly. Alex s working on the algorithms for lay out. Ian is working on making this as a 3D appl.

Jordan and Bharath talked about Aflred, a beverage serving Robot. Jordan (and others) are working on the mechanical design and their implementation  They have completed the design in paper and they have started their implementation. They have thought through sensor problems and tires, breaks etc. Bharath is working on the software side (working with a tablet on Alfred). Alfred is supposed to be used on April 13th on accepted students day. Hopefully everything will work out.

Again an impressive talks and useful sharing of knowledge and suggestions made my day!

Week 8 (3/19/2013) Spring 2013

Week 8 (3/19/2013) Spring 2013

 Deers braving snow-storm in Troy

Despite the snow storms string Monday and lasting through mid Wednesday (3/21/2013-3/23/2013), RCOS meeting went as planned.  The attendance is pretty good and the presentations were awesome as usual. We had seven presentations this week:

1) Matt O'Brien-Archer'sFriend http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/archers-friend/

2) Austin McGuire, Daniel Felizardo, Tianyi Chen and Kevin Fung- Rate My Stream  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rate-my-stream/

3) Mike Agnew - Schenectady Online Reservation System (ReserveMe/PermitMe)  - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

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

5) Varun Madiath - Haskell SSH Client  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/haskell-ssh-client/

6) Dan Vegeto, Jesse Freitas, Doug Norton and Eric Zang - Collective Congress  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

7) Joshua Makinen and Stephen Hammer - Resistance Color Scanner http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/resistance-color-scanner/

Matt O has been progressing  along with his Archer's friend. He has been doing his implementations on Android 4.1 and up. He hopes to release his version of the software before the end of this semester.

Rate my stream team have been progressing along well. They even showed a demo of their system. They have even posted their slides in their blog! 

Mike A's progress with ReserveMe has been going well. He has met with Schenectady Council and they are satisfied with his project. His software is planning to be used this summer.

Zach's project has been hampered by the lack of progress in the back end of the system. Zach has been progressing along with GUI and his javascript code.

Varun and Bharath talked about ssh client library for Haskell.  They have implemented  handshaking protocol and showed a demo.

Collective Congress group is progressing along well. They have modularized their system and rewritten many of their original code. They hope to have an alpha version by the end of the semester.

Resistance color scanning is making a dent - They are trying to get the resistance (as an android) by scanning their color code - They are planning to good image processing library to improve their system -

It was a hectic Tuesday - but well attended and a lot accomplished.

Week 7 (3/5/2013) Spring 2013

Week 7 (3/5/2013) Spring 2013

We are at the midpoint of the semester - The projects are coming along well. There has been code/blog updates despite homeworks/projects/tests. We had six talks this week.

1) Bharath Santosh, Dimitri Dimitrov, Benjamin Caulfield, and Tim Slowikowski  Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

2) Bharath Santosh,and Diogo Moitinho de Almeidad  ProtoML http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/protoml/

3) Timothy McMullen - Awesome Wav http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/awesome-wav/


4) Vera Axelrod and Andrew Karmani   Yet another exam scheduler (YAExs) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/yet-another-exam-scheduler-yaexs/

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

6) Asher Glick, Jerome Schneider, Elizabeth Towns, Andrew Karmani, Avi Weinstock - BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

Bharath, Dimitiri, Benjamin and  Tim talked about their progress in Peirce Logic Proof system. This project has been progressing along  They even showed a demo. They are also planning tutorial as well as several example proofs.

Next Bharath and Diogo talked about their protoML library. They have been making fantastic progress. They also showed a demo of their project. More than that they (along with Deon and Zachary)gave their impressive performance in http://www.kaggle.com/competitions Kaggle Competitions.

Timothy has been progressing making Awesome Wav parallel. In the process he has also removed as many bugs as he can. He us using pthread libraries and parallelizing I/O file operations. He showed a demo and hopes to collect metrics on speed up due to parallelization.

Vera and Andrew talked about yet another exam scheduler. They are using integer programming (open source) solver and use a warm up start (since the solution may take several hours). They also have a front end where department administrators can interact with the system. They are working on the permission setup and a fine tuning the bac-kend.

Deon talked about his FastAPI to recognize images taken from android phone. He is using open source image recognition algorithms for obtaining features of images.. His system compares with  millions of stored images and comes up with answers an scores of their answers. He showed a small demo of his system.

Finally Asher and Beth (and Avi) talked about their Briefcase project. They have made substantial progress with their system. Multiple edits work (currently for their spreadsheet).  They are releasing an API to be used with other file sharing systems. They are also working on documentations and commenting the code.

I learn a lot from the question answering sessions (from the perceptive questions and suggestions from the students stretch ones realize/appreciate different facets).  Nice evening well spent and as usual my horizon has expanded. (The way my horizon is expanding I may go to different galaxy soon! :) )

Week 6 (2/26/2013) Spring 2013

Week 6 (2/26/2013) Spring 2013

 RCOS has got space in AE (Amos Eaton ) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amos_Eaton_Hall (amos eaton 2nd floor (AE 205, 206 and 207 - a suite of three interconnected rooms!). The mentors have started holding office hours on Fridays from 4 to 5:00 pm. Please come and utilize the space (and write great code and share them).  Please see the floor plan here http://zim2411.info/floorplans/AmosEaton200.pdf   Hopefully my requests to RCOS students to submit abstracts for ugrs symposium have been listened to!

We had three speakers talk about their projects.

1) Beth Werbaneth, Sebatian Serbora, Mitchell Zemsky and Robert Roghani. - Kinect Gesture Library http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kinect-gesture-library/

2) Chris Celi - Top Soil  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/topsoil/

3) Colin Rice - Bittoll  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bittoll/

Beth, Sebastian, Mitchell and Robert talked about their Gesture Library for Kinect. They use Unity game engine with Kinect.They have quite a few sensors for the entire body. Currently they use Bayesian method to predict/learn their gestures. In future they are planning to use other methods for better prediction. Also by selectively taking the sensors, they hope to improve their prediction of gestures. They had a mini demo in which they were able to predict the gesture of human signs for letters H, A and C. It is also nice to see tat the groups has been working together and divided the work among the various members.

Chris talked about Topsoil (a git like for projects and ideas). Chris is planning to use ruby on rails for his project. e is also going to use heroku as a web server.  People can suggest ideas and others can contribute and make suggestions to the project. This project will be extremely useful for new students who want to join RCOS and want to bounce back ideas. There were a number of questions and suggestions.

Colin talked about his project Bittoll. Colin's idea is to create a library and website allowing computers to generate bitcoins, send them to other computers, and verify their receipt.

Colin has a trail server and showed a demo of how it works. His idea is to charge for use in a minimal manner(thereby reducing spams). His goal is to have multiple of his servers generating the bitcoins. His ideas seem very intresting and invited useful discussions.

Once again a week well spent in the company of clever, helpful and innovative students. 

Week 5 (2/22/2013) Spring 2013

Week 5 (2/22/2013) Spring 2013

This week was President's day week - RPI had a holiday on Monday (Please see a nice LA Times cross word puzzle here based on presidents' theme!) and we had Monday schedule on Tuesday! So our regular meeting took place on Friday instead of Tuesday.  I am really happy to see so many green smiley faces in http://rcos.rpi.edu/ (21 of 34 projects updated, 18 of 34 repositories updated and 15 of 34 blogs updated! ) - Great job and also thanks to Colin Rice for stepping to be a sysadmin.

We had the following speakers


1) David Vorrick, Sean Moran, Forest Trimble, Luke Champign and Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi
- Linux Video Processing Program http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mkvsynth/

2) Sean Chase,Amelia Peterson and, Tiffany Entwistle - Lasers and Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lasers-and-logic/

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

4) Ethan Bond, Nikhil Srinivasan, Austin Gulati, Damian Mastylo and
Raymond Jacobssen  - Baby Notes http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/babynotes/

5) Christian Johnson and Dan Kimball  - RPIDirectory  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

6) Jorel Lalicki, Brian Barnes, Jonah Gruber, Justin Jones, Monica
Kosciu and Andrew Lynch - Open Source Spectrometer...  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-spectrometer/

David, Sean, Forest, Luke and Wyler talked about their video processing system for linux.  They are progressing along. Their idea is to get a simplified version working. One of their stumbling blogs is to write an interpreter for a scripting language.  As usual there were a number of suggestions and volunteers to help them. I am also glad to see tat te work gets divided among group members.

Sean, Amelia and Tiffany talked about their lasers and logic game. Since their project involves both hardware and software, they are progressing on both ends. They even had a working (almost working) demo of their hardware/software. 

Shawn and Brendan talked on their project Dr. Memory. Brendan is getting familiar and building it on Fedora. Shawn is continuing his work on windows 64 (for windows 8/7) system calls.

Ethen, Nikhil, Austin, Damian and Raymond are making great strides with Baby Notes. They have a schedule and they are closely sticking with the schedule. Their project which monitors/takes notes on their baby progress will be easily adaptable to other situations (where one wants to monitor) and consult with social community 

Christian and Dan reported their progress with API documentation and intelligent search for RPI Directory. They also reported that the RPIDirectory for Androids are out in the play story.

Jorel, Brian, Jona, Justin, (Monica) , Tim and Andrew talked about the Spectrometer project and another project on capacitance for Physics 2 lab. Both projects are progressing along.  The capacitance project is almost done.  

I was elated to see the progress and the active participation. I am really privileged to be associated with this group.

  

Week 4 (2/12/2013) and (2/15/2013) Spring 2013

Week 4 (2/12/2013) and (2/15/2013) Spring 2013

The weeks are rolling by too quickly. We had two meetings this week. On Tuesday, we had talks by

1) Prof. Fran Berman  - Big Data Government Intiative

2) Asher Glick and Matt Zanchelli - pascode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ios-passcode/ and othe pass code 

3) Tor Hagerman libAlexandria 

4) Colin Kuebler Koala  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

5) Ryan Maxfield IPhone app

Prof. Berman talked about the international efforts in having an infrastructure set up for sharing data. She is leading US efforts. She mentioned that this effort may be similar to the internet initiative taken during 70's and 80's. Lots of interesting things need to be resolved (a lot of social and technological problems) - She encourages students to  contact her.

Asher and Matt talked about their combined efforts to making an easy pass code application that works in browsers for various domains (freeing the users of remembering the passwords). They showed a demo of their system. There were lots of interesting questions and suggestions (including to have an API)

Tor talked about his system level design for his machine learning library (like library of Alexandria) it is a library of libraries).  Tor follows a data flow model for his library - He has done a lot of commits to the repository. He is planning to build an end to end system,

Colin Kuebler presented his Koala System. He has been working on this for three semesters. He hopes to release of his software, get feedback of his system. He is planning to develop a community website.

Ryan talked about finding crab buoy application for IPhones. He outlined the importance of finding crab buoys. He is using customized GPS hardware in the buoys. There were a number of suggestions.

On 2/152013, we had two talk by RCOS alumni

1) Peter Hajas '12

2) Tim Horton '11

Peter talked about the importance of contributing to RCOS projects. Sharing and contributing enables one to be more visible in the community (as well as making RPI and RCOS more visible).

Tim talked a very large open source project webkit http://www.webkit.org/ and how he has been contributing to it. He encouraged every one to make contribution to some (large)open source project (may be webkit too)

I will also recommend reading these two blog posts (by Tim Horton)

http://www.hortont.com/blog/on-rcos-and-getting-a-job/

http://www.hortont.com/blog/on-rcos-or-open-software-at-rensselaer/

 

All in all, it was a fantastic week.

Week 3 (2/5/2013) Spring Semester 2013

Week 3 (2/5/2013) Spring Semester 2013

We are already in third week of Spring semester.  With so many activities going on, it is difficult to keep track of everything. After a group taken down, we settled into earing some great talks.

We had talks by 

1) Prof. Pauline Oliveros  - Adaptive Use Musical Instrument (AUMI) http://deeplistening.org/site/adaptiveuse

2) Kenley Cheung - WebTech Group Union

3) Jonathan Goldszmidt - Nexus (City Government)

4) Zach Jablons, Jerry Schneider - BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

5) Mei Si - Mandarin Project and Immersive Environment

Prof. Oliveros talked about her project on Adaptive Musical Instrument (AUMI) - to help children with disabilities to play musical instruments. Her talk was the most inspiring to me. She demonstrated her project. With tracking movement of the eyes her system is able to play different musical instruments. She talked about how her system enhanced the lives of young children. She talked future projects to make it open source, develop analytics to measure children's growth  and to make the user interface simpler. Information about her research may be found http://deeplistening.org/site/adaptiveuse   and their software may be found 

AUMI 3.0 for Mac: https://mega.co.nz/#!HYE0iCpB!eWqjSFqwZTHbLPxWJ3nFzwa1gDxQ_vaa-8f4Xze15go

AUMI 3.0 for Windows: https://mega.co.nz/#!DF8liBDY!RpGx3X_f3C7LaZfhLDc88il-5EIAWGWpk65NvBEiVM0    (Please test how they work in windows)

Kenley talked about recent improvements in Concerto 2. They ave written the system in Rub on Rails. They also have a weekly meeting, test driven development and a nightly updates. Concerto 2 has been adapted in many universities (including Clarkson U) and they are getting user feedbacks for their new design.

Jonathan G talked about their nexus project to make a system usable by City Business Bureau. Jonathan is developing  a backend where his project partner is developing the front end.  For the front end, they have a lot of mock-ups. For the  backend they are developing  object models and relations. Their aim is to have the software release by May (to be used  in Troy)

Jerry and Zach talked about their Blue Mesh Project. Their plan is to make their system robust and  develop a few applications. Since this will be Jerry's last semester, Jerry is anxious to complete this project. Jerry also talked about hi side project that uses instagram API -  Zach also talked about his side project - It is great to see many side projects (On the other hand I do hope that many of these projects get used by many)

Finally Mei Si talked about Mandarin project. She also talked about a number of projects in her groups (she got two graduate students). Gesture identification is an important component of their research. Her current research project involves interaction between two agents.  

As usual there were interesting questions/sharing of information.

Week 2 (1/29/2013) Spring 2013

We had our Spring Group  photo taken (Some of the students had to leave early due to prior commitments).

We had two guest talks and one slide presentations by various groups.
1. Prof James Hendler, Senior Constellation Chair
2. Mr Jackson Zhang -

Prof Hendler has talked about a number of open data initiatives by local, state and federal government. He also narrated is experiences with bigger companies. He suggested a number of open source/open data projects for students. Hope students utilize his resources and strengths to do wonderful and broader impact projects.

Mr. Jackson Zhang   talked about technological start up help for upstate New Yorkers (based out of Syracuse). This is similar to well known Y-combinator   The start up company called Startfest accepts new ideas and funds them for start up and provide mentoring help. Please check out the website and contact Mr. Jackson Zhang if you have any question.

The following students/groups did one slide presentation:

1. Matt Zanchelli - Sonar
2. Stephen Silber IMobile
3. Mike Agnew - PermitMe/ReserveMe
4. Matt O'Brien - Mobile Archery Friend
5. Tim McMullen - AwesomeWav Parallelized
6. Alex Freska - FlowUr
7. Jordan Yamada - Butler(Robotic)
8. Zach Clapper - Penguin Inventory Management System
9. Bharath Santosh, Tim Slowikowski, Dimiti Dimitrov, Ben Aulfeld - Peirce Logic
10. Deon Robinson - FreakAPI - Next Version
11. Asher Glick, Rachael Redner, Nick Timakodu - Zadatak
12. Asher Glick, Elizabeth Towns - BriefCase
13. Brendan Clark, Shawn Denbow - Dr. Memory
14. Dan Vegeto, Jesse Freitas, Dougn Norton - Collective Congress
15. Varun Madiath - SSH Haskel
16. Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball - RPIDirectory
17. Tor Hagermann = LibAlexandria

All the one slide presentations are awesome and their enthusiasm is infectious. Hope many of the projects succeed and many users  benefit from them.

Week 1 Spring Semester 2013  (1/22/2013)

What a glorious way to start a new semester - that too at the first day of classes. Dr. David Goldschmidt is sharing many of the duties. It is a great help for me. We have a large number of students showing for our first meeting (some new and some old faces). With this large number, we have to move to a larger room, AE 214, which will be our abode this semester. Hope the interest is maintained for the rest of the semester and some awesome open source software gets developed.

Past mentors started off the meeting welcoming all students and encouraging students to learn, share,  write blogs and push their code. Hope every one listens to them!  Dr. Goldschmidt presented with a number of announcemnets and dates. Here they are (Thanks Dr. goldschmidt for following up):

(1) If you haven't already done so, please register for CSCI-4963 RCOS
 (it's a 0-credit course that helps get us a room allocation, among
 other things).  We're up to 48 enrolled last I checked!

(2) Be sure you have your form(s) in before the Add deadline (Mon
 2/4).  You must fill out the URP application (due 1/28).  And if you'd
 like credit rather than pay, you must also fill out an Independent
 Study form.  These can be signed by Moorthy or me -- check our
 websites for office hours (or hit us up at the next RCOS meeting).
 MORE DETAILS at http://rcos.rpi.edu/howtojoin/ (which also describes
 the all-important proposal).

(3) Anyone who'd like to be a mentor, please email Moorthy and I by
 the end of this week.

(4) I'm way desperate for a Drupal expert to help teach how to
 administer a simple Drupal site -- probably an hour or two in the
 McNeil room at some point soon (your schedule).  Free food!  Please
 email me.

(5) If you'd like to be on the new RCOS OFFICE SPACE committee (we'll
 use both our brains and our brawn to get AE205-207 set up for RCOS),
 please email me.  We want to have a "grand opening" in March and make
 a big deal of it!

Here's a list of upcoming events we need to have a strong showing at:

(a) Black Family Technology Awareness Day (BFTAD) is Saturday 2/2 from
 9am to 5pm.  Please email Sharon Simmons (simmos2@cs.rpi.edu) to help
 out.  FREE LUNCH!  And as I mentioned, you'll see President Jackson
 lead the Electric Slide!  Woohoo!  Seriously, though, please attend if
 you can and help by showing some of the interesting/cool projects you
 are working on.  The theme is "Connecting Minds to STEM through Music
 and the Arts" -- though any cool stuff we're doing would be great.
 Sharon can describe the event in more detail -- it's a great event, so
 I hope to see you there.  Did I mention free food?

(b) Don't forget the Career Fair is 2/13-14 at the Armory!

(c) Prepare for poster sessions -- in particular, in mid-March,
 there's the Undergraduate Research poster session.  Make yourselves
 and RCOS look really really good.

(d) Also, there's Accepted Students Day on 4/13, where we also do
 poster sessions and welcome accepted students, trying to convince them
 to come to RPI, do CSCI (!), RCOS, etc.  More free food.

(e) We need to schedule a HACK-A-THON -- let's discuss dates for this
 at our next meeting.

We then have a 1 slide presentations by various groups presenting projects ( idea was to encourage feedback and to attract new developers (who have not chosen a specific project) for working on these projects.

We had presentations by

• Jerry Schneider/Zachary Jablons - Blue Mesh

• Vera Axelrod, Andrew Karmani, Colin Steifel  - Yet Another Exam Scheduler
•  Celi - Ruby On Rails Top Soil
• Emily Anderson, Sean Chase and ? - Lasers and Logic
• David Vorric, Sean Moran, Luke Champine, Forest Trimble - Linux Video Processing
• Beth Werbenath - Kinect Gestures Library
• Jorel Lalici - Cost Effective Spectrometer
• Bharath Santosh, Diogo Almeida - ProtoML - Rapid Prototype Machine Learning Python Library
• Ethan W and Nikhil Srinivasan - Baby Notes (IPhone app for child care)
• Colin Rice - Bit Troll - Secure ssh for BitCoin
• Daniel et al - Rating system for Game Streamers

All the presentations are well received. Please submit your completed URP's to Dr. Goldschmidt or to me before the end of Thursday (last day)