We are close to the midpoint of summer session. Students and the projects are picking up momentum. We had three scheduled talks (One of the four talks changed their mind)
We had presentations by
1) Dr. Goldschmidt Stress test of Grapefruit - https://github.com/grahamcrac
2) Chenrui Cao, Kai Kang, Xi Xi, Juntao Zhuang - 2 W (When and Where)http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2
3) Robert Rouhani - Data Oriented design - He has already posted his talk slides here http://slides.com/
Dr. Goldschmidt gave a brief description of Grapefruit -MOOC software that he spearheaded in building it. It was written in Ruby on Rails. Around 40 students logged on to the system (created accounts) and tried to use the video and other facilities simulatenously. Many students gave useful feedback (Grapefruit video does not seem to appear in mobile devices) - This software s going to used this summer for the bridge calculus program. Already Calculus content is placed here. We will hope that Grapefruit is a great success. Much is riding on its success.
Chenrui, Kai, Xi and Juntao talked about when and where. They are buildin android application to know the building hours, locations, maps, office hours and offic elocations as an app for Android. Eventually they want to merge it with RPI Mobile and RPIphone. Many suggestions are given about the scrapping of the data, have an automatic update. They provide both searchable as well as browsable interface.
Robert talked how to speed graphics application by judiciously placing data together. In just object oriented programming one may not worry about where data reside inside the object. Lack of a clever organization may incur cache misses and a lot of disk/memory reads. Since processor speeds are much faster memory access speeds Robert outlined how to achieve the speed-ups. He gave some bench mark data which utilizes a judicious data organization. He also talked how such an organization will be helpful in multithreaded applications. His talk slikes may be found here http://slides.com/
Since we had only three talks, I tried to give an inspirational talk. I talked abot I lucked out in getting a sequence in Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences http://oeis.org . I told them about the simple python program I wrote http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.2878 and how Allen Lavoie, a former RCOS student sped up the program using threads. Allen's code is here. https://github.com/allenlavoie/path-counting . Our sequence is here http://oeis.org/search?q=1%2C3%2C12%2C28%2C48&language=english&go=Search
Finally I told them how I satisfied one of the items in my bucket list and advised all the students to keep a bucket list. I advised them to accomplish the items in the bucket list one by one.
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