Week 1 - Fall 2014 Week of 25th August 2014

First week Fall Semester 2014

Fall semester started with a lot of apprehension. Not much money is left to provide full stipen during this academic year. We have been working hard to raise fund. Till we get mney in hand or some promise, nothing is certain.

On Tuesday we had brief presentations (by Dave Goldschmidt, Lead mentors Jorel and Robert and me). Dave G laid out the facts (current situation of RCOS). I gave a brief hsitory of RCOS My slides may be found here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tJgDzVwDdBqkpy1IKZOK70WbwVvlUc65yIk-C3Y1d44/edit

on Friday Prof. Stewrat talked about the future vision and plans for RCOS. We are all optimistic for the outlook of RCOS.

Jorel and Robert are the lead mentors for this semester. They talked about the plans for the current semester. They also invited mentors to introduce themselves to the group. Jorel and Robert suggested one minute Elevator pitch slide for all the projects (Robert provided a template).

On Friay we had  35 elevator pitch presentations https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rbOx2KvSlUFBK_uziiRaqlW_UE8u9OQPhhEqEo0YOPQ/edit#gid=0 . They are well presented  and to the point. Each project presentation is for one minute. The slides (for all the projects) may e found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nSH-m29z51eoRsTJcJt9jCAgl6roOmgK6N1ztEotgy8/edit?usp=sharing

I am optimistic about the fall semester. We had around 130 students attending Tuesday and Friday meetings. Let us hope for the best.

Week 12 - Last Week (8/5/2014) and (8/7/2014) of Summer 2014

Week 12 - Last Week of Summer 2014

We had a cake to culminate the end of summer session 2014.  We committed many mistakes and we did learn from our mistakes - Hopefully we will not commit the same mistakes again. 

The following groups made presentations.

Tuesday (8/5/2014) (Attendance has been dropping like a ton of bricks)

1)   Qinglong Kong, Nanyu Zeng, Yang Wang, Tianbo Xie - Window Cleaning Robot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/clear-glass-project/ (mentor Jorel) - 2nd Talk

2) Daniel Baek and Nikil Sunilkumar - OpenIRT http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openirt/ and Sodexo Menu Parserhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/  (Mento Daniel) -2nd Talk

3)  Brian Corbin, David Claxton - Brewed  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/brewed/ (ind. project) - Brian's first talk

4)  Adam Susser - Dark Matter Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dark-matter-simulation/ (Mentor Nicholas)

5) - Jim Boulter, Emmett Hitz, & Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi - MeNext  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/ (Mentor Jim) - 2nd Talk

6)  Courtney Lang, Brandon McLear, Kirk Smith - Kitchen Assistant http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kitchen-assistant/ (Mentor Aaron) - 2nd Talk

7)  Andy Kakkaramadam, Stephen Romano - RoomScheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/roomscheduler/ (Mentor Andy) -2nd Talk

8) Huiye Liu, Xitu Chen, Eunkyoung Lee, Peiyang Ding, Yiding Zhang - ShengGuanTu http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/  http://shengguantu.weebly.com/ (Mentor Robert)

9) Matt Fenlon and Yeoni Lee - ILS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ils/ (mentor Soraya) - First Talk

10) Avi Weinstein - Asteroids implemented in Scheme/openGL (ind project)

Thursday 8/7/2014 (8 students attended our extra session meeting!)

11)  Avi Weinstock, Alex White, Hayleigh Sanders - Markov-grammatical-inferencer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mgi/ (mentor Joe) - 2nd Talk

12) Jorel Lalicki - Hacodex and others (NATPunch) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/hackodex/ (mentoe Nicholas) - 3rd Talk

13) Zexin Wan - open source card game cetner http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/ (mentor Jee Woong) - First Talk

14) Terrence Farrel - SpritzReader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spritzreader/ (mentor Connor) (by slides and youtube)

Despite my misgivings and misperceptions, most of the students did a creditable project. Wish they had worked harder and completed their projects (or complete their projects before the end of summer) - easier said than done (of course)

What follows is my understanding

Window Cleaning Robot team is in the 3d printing phase of their project.

OpenIRT is still in the design phase. Sodexo Menu parser has difficulty with the day of the menu parsing and spelling errors.

Open Brewary has a preliminary implementation - still some way to go - They are doing their project in IPhone.

Dark matter Simulation found that dynamic fraction may not be the cause of moncerous (/) ring.

MeNext has at least two to three weeks work left to get the two ends talking and to beta test their project.

Room Scheduler hasa lot of data to load and to hand convert into a SVG,

ShengGuanTu has at least three weeks left to get a skeleton of their game working.

Interactive Liquor System had an arduino breakdown. They abandoned their initial implementation in Python - They will be doing it in C or C++ . There was a lvely discussion about adding new features and usefulness of this system.

Asteroid simulation (an independent project) was talked by Avi. he used Scheme and JOGL to implement his system.

Zexin talked about his opensource card framedwork. It still needs considerable work to release an alpha version (written in Java)

Avi, Hayleigh talked MGI (puprose was to learn the programming language OCaml)- Avi did some parser for Natural language like grammar (markov grammar) and display parse tree. He also used Markov Grammar to  generate sentences (depending up on the Markov-ness the sentences made sense or not0. He then showed how to parse those sentences. Hayleigh talked about Qlearning Algorithm to predict the states. Since she could not use Natural Language models, she experimented with Prisoner's dilemna and showed results.

Jorel talked about his projec NatPunch which will facilitate peer to peer gaming without the need of a server. he explained  the theory and his methodology.. He implemented using PHP. His presentation elicited a number of questions from the aprse (but attentive) audience. He then talked about Hacodex. He tried to implement using Django and he  was not satisfied with it (He dislikes programming in Python) and Django may be an overkill for Hacodex.

Terrence sent me slides for SpritzReader as this will be his first talk (and he could not be at RPI because of medical appointments). He had a video of his  demo https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2uVnShx62s_ME9DcjNFSlg2c00/edit?usp=sharing_eil As per his email, " I'm not ready to publish the app yet as I feel it isn't complete, but hope to continue working on it this fall semester, hopefully with a couple of friends."

I was a bbit disappointed mostly with myself - my inability to motivate the students to accomplish what the projects promised. May be I am running out of steam or I am out of touch with reality! Any way a sad state for me to be in :(