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.