Week 11 (7/29/2014) Summer 2014

Week 11 (7/29/2014) Summer 2014

This is the penultimate week of the Summer session. So we had a large number of talks. Unfortunately we did not record the videos as Gabe is out of town for a well earned rest and a visit with his family. A photo taken during last weeks hackathon

1) Kit Hammer & Noelle Todd - Client DB http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-pantry-client-database/ (mentor Theo) - 2nd Talk - Great

2) Kevin Sullivan Rise https://github.com/Sidetalker/Rise

3) Maia Marchetti - Milkyway@home Expansion http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome-server-expansion/ (mentor Robert) - 2nd Talk - Great

4) Bobby Parker,Zach Vanderzee and David Koloski- Unity-Open 2D http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/unity-open-2d-toolkit/ (mentor Robert) - 2nd Talk - Great

5)  Peter Kang and Kevin Andrade - AskRPI - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/askrpi/ (mentor Connor) - 2nd Talk - Great

6) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang, Aman Zargapur -  Pokemon RPI - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (Mentor Jim) - 2nd Talk Great

7) Jake Weiss and Roland Judd -  Milkyway@Home - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome/  (Mentor Ji Woong) -2nd Talk Great

8) Jake Lowey and Jonathan Bergman - 3D HCI -  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/3d-hci/ (mentor Jorel) - 2nd Talk Great 

9)  Ravi Panse and Henry Choi - RPHub - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rphub/ (mentor Andy) -2nd Talk Great

10) Michael weldon, Victor Iwasko and Orin Amsden - TextLock - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/textlock/ (mentor Soraya) - 1st Talk

11) Eric Zhang - GitMusic/Cantabile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cantabile/ (mentor ?) - 1st Talk

Kit nad Noelle have made a prototype and showed it to the food pantry people(one computer science and one nontechnical). They liked it. They requested feature requests. They hope to have the system done by the end of Fall Semester.

Kevin Sullivan talked about his IPhone application for elevation computation (using GPS and google map api). He is also developing nice 2 D graphics application.His goal is to release the app and then work on 3D maps.

Maia talked about her .new Milkyway@home server. She has done the server side implementation an has tested. She has to port her server.

Bobby , Zach and David have done a marvelous job with unity 2d (now called Pb or Lead) - They have their code forked and they have accomplished everything they set forth. It is indeed the most successful project this summer.

Peter and Kevin have implemented their AskRPi - a mixture of reddit and twitter with a direct email to professor for answers to specific questions. They need a bit more work before they can release their software.

Theodore, Tammy and Aman have made progress with their PokemanRPI. All their background code is done. They now have to customie for the story. They plan to do it during the rest of the summer.

Jake and Roland talked about their use of CMake in making all their code for different machines and their new dashboard. Jake talked about testing their code (of background separation) by creating a model which generates data - this data could be used for testing their code. He also plans to write the code in C, C++ from python to speedup.

Jake and Jonathan talked about their 3D HCI and their progress. They could not show ther demo because of their arduino broke/fired. They have their finger/keyboard gestures working, but not their mouse gestures. They attributed to the problem in accelerometer data. I requested them to post a youtube video of their keyboard gestures working.

Ravi talked about RPIHub - a repository of research projects woth tags. They have a prototype website working. They plan to release it to  RPI community during the fall semester.

Michael,, Victor and Orin talked about their crypted text essaging systems. They showed a demo of their system using androids. The message gets encrypted as it is sent and when it is received by the client, the message gets decrypted. There were a lot of suggestions from students how to improve their system.

Eric Talked about his project gitmusic which is a music collobration system. The git part is till not working. He has a rudimentary editor and he has a rudimentary audio playing system. This project needs more work (partly as he changed his project and there are no mentors). Again the students asked a lot of questions and suggestions.

Again I learnt a lot from attending these talks.

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Last week's hackathon (7/19/2014) was a great occassion to get some work done. A fraction of the rcos group showed up . Many thanks to Jorel and Robert for awesome help and contribution. They went above and beyond to get this done. We even had an official photographer come by to shoot some photos!

Only two more weeks left for the end of the summer. Here is a re-re-revised list of talks today.  Great to see so many smiley faces on http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ page - Please keep up the good work and keep the momentum going. 

1) Chenrui Cao, Kai Kang, Xi Xi, Juntao Zhuang - 2W http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas) 2nd Talk - Great

2)  Charles Machalow - cDashboard - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (mentor Charles)  2nd Talk - Great

3) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/ (mentor Niccholas) 2nd talk - Great

4) Tracy Marholin - Music Theory RPG- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/music-theory-rpg/  2nd Talk - Great - no code updates in Observatory?

 

5) Sami Modak, Tong Liu - Anti-Distracted Driving, http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/anti-distracted-driving/ (mentor Andy) -

6) Sean Hagan - Plan Of Study - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-plan-of-study/ (mentor Connor)

7) Dan Bruce, Gabe Perez - NMS - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/polytechnic-nms/ (mentor Connor)

8) Zexin Wan - OSCGC- (Open Source Card Game Center) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/(mentor Ji Woong) 

9) Michael Hosier -  Open Cores- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/opencores/ (mentor Jorel) 

10)  Soraya Fouladi, Andrew Kaiser, Theo Browne - RPI CS Website -

11) Abby Lopaty - Water tag gun - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/water-tag-gun/ (mentor Soraya)

Chenrui, kai, Xi and juntao talked about their 2W ssytem (when and where on Androids). The data base lies with client (in SQLite). they showed a demo of the system and it is pretty functional. They plan to include abbreviations, maps and the data updated. They plan to release to the Android market before the beginning of Fall semester.

Charles gave his second talk about CDashboard. He worked on the comments that he recieved during his first talk. He fixed a racing condition bug, improved stopwatch, no clipping of photos/slide show. He showed a demo. It is written in C# and looks like a cool system,

Nicholas gave a second talk on OpenLab. He has fixed the crash problem. As per his blog post "We're very proud to announce version 1.0 of OpenLab. This release includes an extensive plugin framework, loading config files, editing config files on-the-fly, and saving them back to xml. Coming up next is calibration and logging plugin support." - Open Lab version 1.0 is out - Hope others will start using it. Jorel had a nice suggestion suggesion about the paarameters setup for serial interfaces,

Tracy gave her second talk about music theory RPG. She is getting the ngame mechanics working. She is using PyGame (which she found sometimes difficult to use) - She may shift to Unity in future. As of the moment she is going to have a version of the game (playing against an enemy) for notes,, chords and rhythms etc,

Sami and Tong talked about AntiDistracted Driving. The idea is to prvent texting while driving. They find when they are driving by using accelermeter sensor. If the velocity exceeds certain value, they will lock the texting capability. Tong was concentrating in calculating positions and velocities (of doing a double and single integeral of accelerometer data- The integration introduces noice - Tong is trying to reduce the error). Som suggestions cam about using a periodic GPS data to correct the errors. Sami is working on  locking the key oard if the velocity exceeds certain value. They are doing this for Androis and IPhone platform. There were a lot of interesting suggesions to this group. They hope to have a version before the end of the summer.

Dan and Game talked about NMS (news Management System). They are writing from scratch. This will be the poly website. They gave a demo of their system. they want to ring out this system by fall (or at least concurrently run with their old wordpress based system).  Their system accounts of multiple positions and multiple authors. They want to build some features that are present in http://rpitv.org/

Michael is building a open source video controller using FPGA.  The main objective of open cores is according to  http://opencores.org/opencores,mission

"Our main objective is to design and publish core designs under a license for hardware modeled on the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for software. We are committed to the ideal of freely available, freely usable and re-usable open source hardware."

Michael's main subobjective is o contribute o Opencores in this fashion- accorsding to his projects page  "plan to contribute to OpenCore’s project categories of Video Controller and Communication Controller (http://opencores.org/projects) through the development of an LVDS LCD controller (similar to this project: http://g3nius.org/lcd-controller/) and a communication controller for communicating through Display Port with the ultimate goal of making the two compatible with each other and with other projects on OpenCores."

Michael hopes to have his system (software will be in VHDL) before the end of the summer session.

Soraya, Andrew and Theo are remaking RPI Cs website. They are doing it Ruby on Rails. Soraya had a mockup sketch of the opening page (There were good comments/feedback on that - change the color to red, white and black). Andrew and Theo are working on hte backend. They solicited help from RCOS students to get the project done. This is a high profile project and has to be done before the beginning of Fall semester. Their talk slides can be found in https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dZzVNOUxYYVNxLWFFZ2hESFF4YldFazJzdHRZ/edit

Finally Abby talked about building Water Gun. She is doing fluid mechanics calculations, structural analysis to build water Gun. She is leaning on building a skeleton instead of a skin. Since she got the material late, she will be unable to complete the project before the end of summer. But she hopes to have the simulation done before the end of summer. She is planning to use 3 D printing and low cost materials.

The talks are interesting and questions were also interesting. I am getting discouraged by the apathy shown by some students. A few students do not update blogs, post code and not give talks. I feel awful and I am helpless!

Week 9 (7/15/2014) Summer 2014

Week 9 (7/15/2014) Summer 2014

Summer session is speeding along. We have only three more meetings left. Hope most of the projects have been progressing well. With the upcoming hackathon (sign up link http://goo.gl/ePkBDe ) this coming Saturday, I do hope that there will be greater progress with the projects.

We had six talks this week. The following groups presented their progress with their projects.

1) Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman -  RPI Walk http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-walk/  (mentor Robert Rouhani) - 2nd Talk (great job)
2) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang, Aman Zargapur - Pokemon RPI  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Jim Boulter)
3)  Courtney Lang, Brandon McLear, Kirk Smith - Kitchen Assistant http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kitchen-assistant/ (mentor Aaron Gunderson)
4) Aaron Gunderson and John Yannou - Whiteboard http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/4xb/ (menotr Aaron Gunderson) 2nd Talk (great job)
5)  Andy Kakkaramadam and Stephen Romano - RoomScheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/roomscheduler/  (mentor Andy Kakkaramadam ) - 
6)  Ravi Panse and Henry Choi - RPHub  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rphub/ (mentor Andy Kakkaramadam) -

Ezra and Tahsin are progressing along with RPI Walk as they gave their second talk. Icons are up and the routing algorithm works and handicapped access information is also there. They are using Open Street Map now. (They are also investigating the use of Google Maps). They showed a nice demo.

Theodore and Tommy talked about PokemanRPI. They have adapted Pokeman to RPI campus setting and the dialog uses RPI jargon. They have done the game mechanics, created their own tile editor. Even though much remains, they plan to have a simplified working version by the end of the summer. They also showed a demo.

Courtney and Brandon talked about Kitchen Assistant. They use Django framework, sql and python for development. They are making good progress in their project. Showed a sdemo of the current version. They have implemented a preliminary registration and logging and a database schema. Their system will have a shopping list (units is a problem) recipes and recipe filtering. They have more work left to do - but they hope to have a version by the end of Summer.

Aaron and John gave their second talk on Whiteboard. John is concentrating on the rankings of which home works to be done and when so as to get the best possible GPA for the semester. Aaron is geeting the assignments and start tie working. This is their second talk. They have made great progress. They are currently not doing the section related work. Their talk slides are here http://slides.com/aarongunderson/whiteboard#/

Andy and Stephen talked about the room scheduler project (central place to serve as amap for RPI). They have collected various data and put them in a data base. (mongo db) They are yet to do the front end. Their talk slides can be found here http://prezi.com/1oqqxnmu8mla/roomscheduler/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Ravi and Henry talked about their project RPIHub. Their idea is to collect research projects from various faculty members so that searching for a URP is much simpler. They are doing it as a webservice. They have done preliminary implementation. They hope to complete their project before the end of summer.

All our talks are online at http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1

As usual there were a lot of useful questions and suggestions from the students. That make the whole thing very pleasant and a learning experience. An afternoon well spent.

Week 8 (7/8/2014) Summer 2014

Week 8 (7/8/2014) Summer 2014

With mid point of the summer gone (July 4th in my view is the middle of summer), students are perking up and trying to finish their projects. We had seven presentations this week.

1) Theo Browne - Docktor (For OSX) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/docktor-for-osx/ 
(mentor Theo Browne)

2)  Adam Susser - Dark Matter Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dark-matter-simulation/ (Problem with Observatory Page- dues to lack of mentor?)

3)  Jim Boulter, Emmett Hitz, and Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi - MeNext 
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/(mentor Kevin O'Connor)

4) Bobby Parker, Zach Vanderzee and David Koloski - Unity Open 2D 
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/unity-open-2d-toolkit/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)

5) Connor Ameres -Scrum http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrum/  (mentor Connor Amers)

6)  Robert Rouhani, Samuel Yuan, Renjie Xie, Ryan Lin, Dashiell Kieler - SharpNav http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sharpnav/ (mentor Kevin Fung)

7) Jason Woods, Vatsal Bhagwani, Solomon Mori, Ian Gross - Andriate 
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/andirate/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)

Theo gave a very nice presentation on his docking system for OSX. His system provides different applications for different configurations (these configurations and applications can be customized)He is implementing in Objective C.  He also gave a cool demo. He veen posted is presentation here http://theobrowne.com/Docktor/Presentation1.pdf

Adam gave a talk about Dark Matter Simulation - He is trying to study caustic rings and trying to simulate the hetrogeneous  of n-body problem. He is programming in C. He utliizes both Nemo and Milkyway@home as implementation platforms. He has done some impressive reading of the technical papers. He is currently modeling the macro behavior of hetrogeneous particles. He showed using a video his preliminary results. Adma's project github page is here https://github.com/sussea/NEMO_caustics .

Jim, Emmet and Wyler talked about MeNext -  a democartic client-serer system to view/hear multimedia information. The clients could be in mobile platforms. The clients can add and delete videos and vote on audio/videos. The server (a desktop platform) then selects to play a video/audio that was most popular.

They also (almost) showed a demo on the mobile platform(IPhone). They did demo the server side.

Bobby, Zach and David talked their 2 D extension of Unity. They have posted their talk slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q8zi8MjyghZsI27VZoBKuOIZkC5ygREw4bo0CB3iudw/edit#slide=id.p  I was truly impressed with their progress. Their demo was awesome. Their system (open source and free) ahould be welcme to the unity tool community (for games)

Connor talked about his new system (a scrum ) for developers to keep track of the tasks in the software development cycle. Having participated in scrum last year, I thoink it will be a valuable to have a webtool. Connor showed a short demo of his system.

Robert, Samuel, Ryan and Dashiel talked about their SharpNav system . As per his presentation (thanks for posting the slide), SharpNav is a library with an editor, all written in C# with the following features.

1. It generates navigation meshes
2. It finds paths through navigation meshes
3. It coordinates crowds navigating a mesh
4. It integrates well with a lot of game engines

They showed a very nice demo. Their talk slides may be found here. http://slides.com/robertrouhani/sharpnav-06-08-14#/1

Jason, Vatsal, Solomon and  Ian taked about their project Andriate - for playing a sheet music in Android from a photograph of Sheet music. They nicely divided the work among the four. Two of them are working on Image Processing and getting the notes, one is working on Android and playing of music and the fourth one is combining all these subssytems. This seems to be an ambitious project. They are working hard to get a preliminary version before the end of summer.

There were lots of interesting questions and suggestions from students. As usual, I learnt a lot by attending these talks.  Slowly, all the videos of RCOS talks are being loaded in our youtube channel http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1 - Talks upto week 6 have been loaded.

It was decided that RCOS will have a hackathon on July 19th and 20th in AE 214, 215 and 216.

Awesome Job by the students and the mentors.

Week 7 (7/1/2014) Summer 2014

Week 7 (7/1/2014) Summer 2014

Despite this week being the July 4th week(end),  our meeting room AE 214 was nearly full with expectant and eager students.

This week we had seven(!) talks. The following groups presented their projects.

The following group will present their projects.

1)  Qinglong Kong, Nanyu Zeng, Yang Wang, Tianbo Xie - Window Cleaning Robot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/clear-glass-project/ (mentor Jorel Lalicki)

2)  Charles Machalow - cDashboard http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/

(mentor Robert Rouhani)

3)  Liam Moynihan - LED Color Control http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/led-color-control/  (mentor Moorthy )

4) Eric Mattson, Aesa Kamar, James Lee - CardSharp http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cardsharp/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)

5) Tracy Marholin - Music Theory RPG http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/music-theory-rpg/  (mentor - granfathered class - still willl like to have a mentor as some one to talk to ) Robert Rouhani

6)  Peter Kang and Kevin Andrade - AskRPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/askrpi/

(mentor Connor Ameres)

7)Parker Haynes - TextDump http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/textdump/ mentor Ji Woong Baek

Qinglong, Nanyum Yang and Tianho talked about their window cleaning robot. This is an open hardware project.  They have a prototype model o ftheir robot and showed a little demo. It uses suction (hydraulic)  and two directional beam for moving.  Uses sponges for cleaning. They showed their detailed design (cad model). They are trying to get a more powerful servo motor for suction and movements. Very nice pesentation over all and students had a number of suggestions. Their slides may be found here https://www.dropbox.com/s/th04ayshohsmq3y/Presentation1.pptx

Charles has been continuing withhis cDashboard project. in C# . He has made many nifty improvements to his dashboard, proper tiling, a stop watch and a scalable pic viewer. He has also fixed a number of bugs and made his system more stable. Students had a number of feature requestis to his system. His talk slides amy be found ere https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dTXN1dENYRkxxQThxSUNfZDB5Z1BLUkxrY2U4/edit

Liam talked about his LED color control project. He is coding his project in matlab. The idea is given a set of LED's and the color output one desires, what should be the best possible mixing of colors. Liam has buid a nice GUI in latlab. He showed a demo of his project. This project is done jointly with Lighting Research Center. Sine he was looking for a mentor, I have volunteered to be a mentor.

Eric, Aesa and James presnted their progress in CardSharp. They are coding in C++. Gist is that they are calculating the conditional probabilities  of winning (using enumeration) with the present card deck. They have made some progress with implementation. They want to send a text message about the probabilities. One student suggested using google glass to compute the probabilities. Their talk slides amy be found here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dbjVDWXh1T2NPVHV5RWpCd2xzR1p6Yno5TW5R/edit . 

Tracy presented her progress on MusicTheory RPG. She is coding it in PyGames. She gave a demo of a previous version of a girl walking around a tree in a meadow. The girl is able to understand the scenary and walk accordingly. Tracy's plan is to incorporate music notes in the scenary and the game is to ensure that the player understands music theory so that she can win/play the game effectively.

Peter and Kevin talked about AskRPI - a web interface where the students and faculty members can interact with both academic and nonacdeic questions. It will be like consolidating  Reddit and Quora features. They had a mock up. They want to include search facility (based on tags). They even had a mock up. This web application is built on Ruby on Rails.

Finally Parker talked about his progress on his project TextDump.nHis projects aim is to develo a simple mechanism for trasfer of files between two computers/virtual machines. He has (almost) a prototype working transfering simle textfiles between two systems He is coding his project in C++.  There were interesting suggestions and questions from students.

All in all, very interesting talks and I learnt a lo of new and cool technology, how to convey your ideas and how to present effectively. I also learnt how to listen and how to ask questions and how to provide suggestions.

All in all very interesting week,