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.