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.