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.
(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)
