Week 3 (week of 8th Septmber 2014) Fall 2014

With the forms submitted, RCOS picking up momentum.
We had these talks this week (both on Tuesday and Friday)

Tuesday Talks
Colin Rice '14 (Google) Mesh Networks
Rocco Del Priore - RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/
Peter Piech - RPIMobil http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile-for-android1/
Ramsey, Damian - GrapeFruit  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/grapefruit/

Friday Talks
1)Charlie Machalow - cDashboard  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/

2)Josh Goldberg - Bookswap  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bookswap/

3) Noelle Todd and Christina Hammer Food Pantry  Client Database http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-pantry-client-database/

4)Ji Woong Baek - Sodexo Menu Parser and RPIMobile
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile-for-android1/

On Tuesday, Colin Rice '14 (and RCOS alumni) came to RPI campus (part of google team) and gave a talk about Mesh network ( an efficient algorithm got communication)  He gave a succint tutorial  on meshnetworks ans different routing algorithms. he even gave a demo of a simple mesh network using his algorith, (Colin had implemented the code for the demo in Go)

Rocco talked about the problem he has been facing on releasing RPI mobile in the app store. Besides getting license for RCOS from Apple (some permissions are pending), server where the data is stored is also down. There are other UI issues and RPI shuttle app needs some fixing. Hopefully this app wiill hit the appstore.

Peter talked about RPIMobile. He has placed the latest version  has been downloaded around 200 times. There is much ore work to be done on this app too. From his blog post, it looks like there was a bug reported by RCOS alumni.

Damien and ramsey talked about the current state of grapefruit site. It has been used by at least three faculty members. Based on the feedback they were planning to improve the system. they have a number of developers lined up.

On Friday we had four talks (two of them are past projects - one in summer and one in last Spring).
Charlie talked about his current status of the cDashBoard. He mentioned about the number of bug fixes.
His cDashboard is running on Windows 8.

Josh gave a summary of his Spring RCOS project bookswap. He and another were the principal (among a team of 8 - many did not do any work) architects of bookswap. Josh and his friend used PHP templating and developed a fast display of pages The mobile version still needs work More importantly, he lamented the lack of usage of his system. (Josh's interests have changed since this project and he is not actively working on it) Hope some of the RCOS students take up and make this system usable not only to RPI but other uiversities too.

Noelle and Christina talked about their Client Side Food Pantry Data Base project. They have implemnted their project using python, intertk, sqlite. More importantly they have recieved feedback from the church which was planning to use their system They have modified their interface accordingly. Their system is going tobe used food pantry in a local church from the end of September 2014.

Finally  Ji Woong talked about sodexo menu parser - part of RPI Android project. He has used JSON and made his code more compact and more efficient. He showed the improvement in times to load the menus. One of the problems he encounters is the speeling errors associated with dates and menus. (He was going to use the string edit algorithm - with thanks to Dave Goldschmidt for his explanation in Intro to Algorithms).

Finally Jorel made sure that every project had a mentor. David Goldschmidt is coming with policies for the smmoth(er) running of RCOS.  I am confident that we will have an excellent semester