Week 10 (10/21/2014 and 10/24/2014) Fall Semester

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/rpi/2014fall/#/28 - RPI Home page has a feature story on RCOS - That is simply awesome!

RPI is bristling with many activities and the fall semester is going in full swing.

On Tuesday (10/21/2014) We had two talks:

1) Chenrui Cao, Xi Xi, Renjie Xie, Juntao Zhuang - 2W
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas Pitt)

2)  Dan Fang, ZeXin Wan - Smart Schedule http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/smart-schedule/ (mentor Moorthy)

2W - When and Where started an as andoid app in the summer. It is now modified into a web application - so it could be used . They use a server code (that Dave Goldschmidt has coded in his network programming class) and showed a little demo. Right now,  2W shows the building hours and offices located in buildings. They are planning to integrate with google maps. 

Smart Schedule is to provie an IOS application (for IPhones) . They have crreated a backend for the schedules. Right now they are building a GUI. There was a suggestion/question to integrate SmartSchedule with course registration/selection. Recurring schedule is another suggestion that came from students.

1)Chandler Dumm, Bikram, Spencer Norris -  AskPI-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/askpi/ (mentor Devon Bernard)

2) Dan Baek, Robert Hannum, Jacob Abramson - RPI Mobile Dining Hall
Menu http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/ (mentor Dan Baek
- self mentored?)

3) Cyril George, Akshay Matta, Matt Corsaro - Plan of Study -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/plan-of-study/ (mentor Dimitar Dimitrov)

4) Kevin Fung, Darren Lin, Garrett Chang -  Emissary -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/emissary/  (mentor Kevin Fung - self
mentored)

5) Arya Seghatoleslami and Tom Yang - YumYum!
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/yumyum1/ (mentor Alex Freska)

AskPI is a webapplication built for social application - some voting. Their original aim is to help with student government.  During their talk, students suggested that their project could be of more general use. They are planning to write the entire project in javascript with mongodb. The groups effort is to learn something new and provide a useful web application. This goal is nice and hope they achieve their objectives. They showed a demo of their front end. There were suggestions to imporve that. Backend needs more work. That is what they will be working on, This project is looking for a server. Github was suggested as a solution

RPIMobileDining Hall Menu is to parse sodexo menu and  to provide an app for RPIMobile (android version). Their HTML scrapping and parsing worked (till sodexo changed its html format). They are providing JSON translation of the HTML. Once that is done, the next step is to incorporate into RPIMobile. Future enhancement will include notification of favorite dishes and choice of dietary restriction menu items.

Plan of Study is to provide a mechanism to help students to choose the required and elective courses to fulfil the graduation requirements. The main problem is to get doubl and dual majors and minors. They showed a front end whch the user can select courses in different semesters. Right now the front end works for EE and ECSE and CS courses. They may also provide a category for different departments. The backend has to provide a prerequisites and alternative courses. This project is a high profile project. It can succeed - but needs a close mentoring to get it in giid shape.

Emissary is a spectator of league of legends games. They also provide undocumented features of leagues of legend games. Realtime visualization of games is another important goal. They have done the project using python. They plan to implement the features in coffeescript. They are wll onto completion of their project.

YumYum is a webapplication to find free food available in campus and elsewhere. They decided against scraping - instead getting theemails and other departmental colloquia where free food is available. Also there are commercial opportunities with hotels. .They have a prototype working - Their project is written in Ruby on Rails. They showed a demo - They will add more features to make their project noteworthy. 

In the end a management student (junior) pitched his idea of social connection using IPhones for the choice of clothes. Some of the features included 3D  visualization
As usual there were a number of questions and suggestions from students. That made the eveing very pleasant.

Week 9 (10/14/3024 and 10/17/2-14) Fall Semester

This week is a compressed week - to do 5 days work in 4 days time.  Since Tuesday is a Monday at RPI it added some conflicts.  On top of it, we had an open house on Saturday The above photograph shows RCOS students helping out with Open House. We had meeting both on Tuesday and on Thursday. On Tuesday we had a talk

1) Kirk Smith, Brendan Cazier, Altan Gulen, Lloyd Jones - BallotBoxhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ballotbox/ (mentor Theo Browne)

This group have progressed quite well. They have created a public voting and showed a demo running from a local server They are planning to move that a public webserver They are also working on private voting. They are using ruby on Rails. They are planning to implement a mobil version for Android. 

Their slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JuQNVFlToGvw6k_X_OcjeVFjbUW8pjV_qzt7eq8_QMo/edit?usp=sharing

On Friday we had two talks:

1) Kienan Knight-Boehm, Dylan Lingenau, Spencer Weiner, Barry Hu
- SelfSecured http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/selfsecured/ (mentor Theo Browne)

2) Derek Meer and Michael Hosier - OpenWSN
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openwsn/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

SelfSecured is amobile application for emergency situations.  They mentioned of te problem of git with android development framework. They divide their projec into four parts (panic button, timer, emergency services and docial) so taht all of them will be able to have a full understanding of the entire system. Their slides can be found here http://slides.com/kienankb/selfsecuredupdate1#/ They showed a demo of their system

OpenWSN is a open wireless sensor network project from Berkeley. Derek and Michael are contributing to the project.
They already have one bug and they are learning the big system  They are also implementing a JSON interface to OpenVisualizer.Their final goal is to create a cheap hardware which implements the standard protocol stack. Their talk slide is found here http://slides.com/derekmeer/openwsn1#/

There were excellent questions and suggestions. Usually they make understand the talks much better.
What a great educational opportunity for me and other students.

Week 8 (10/6/2014 and 10/10/2014) Fall Semester 2014

We are past the mid point of the semester. Raymond Jacobsen (Past RCOS member) Alex Freska (RCOS member) , Julius Alexander won Hack Uostate 2014 held in Syracuse University

http://www.dailyorange.com/2014/10/hack-upstate-promotes-collaboration-sees-attendance-increase/

This week on Tuesday(10/6/2014) we had the following presentations:
Unfortunately I was unable to listen to the last three talks (because of my freshman advising session)- On the other hand all the students have psoted their presentations and I was able to read and comprehend as much as I can.

1) Kevin Zheng - Lights Out http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lights-out/
(Mentor Jim Boultier)
2) Kiana McNellis, Sam Seng, Jesse Freitas - HW Server
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/homework-server/ (Mentor Aaron Gunderson)
3) Branden Clark, Ze Qin, Toshi Piazza - Dynamorio
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/ (Mentor Joshua Makinen)
4)  Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman - RPI Walk
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-walk/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)
 5) Kevin O'Connor - PuckmanLabs
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/puckmanlabs/ (Mentor Kevi O'Connor -self
mentored?)

Lightsout project is a mobile application to remind drivers to turn of their car lights after they reached their destination. It sends email notifications. The android app is almost complete. IPhone App is in the implementation phase. He is planning to release the software at the end of the semester.

HW server is going in full swing. They are planning to release an api so that other classes can use this. They showed a nice demo of their current system. They are well on their way to complete this project if not this semester (hopefully by the end of this year).

Dynamorio (Dynamic Library Instrumentation Proram) is a project that has been going strong for the past two years. They have psoted their talk slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/110SA9KDOnI712bzJ8GLXMWSo6JewETaEGJlTmToeylw/edit#slide=id.p  They are working on the heap stack for callback visualizations

RPI walk is progressing along very well.They are redesigning the UI and optimizations on the route - Final aim is to make the routes similar to google maps. Very well done project.

PuckmanLabs is to provide uniform APIS for various data manipulations. The goals are to have cataloged data sets, access control, lightweight support and community support. He has finished scrapper framewrk, Works and APIframework. he is yet to finish the first data set (and more tests), and wrapping the API and deploy. His talk slides are here http://slides.com/kevinoconnor7/urpiapi#/

As usual there were many interesting questions during meeting as well as off line.


On Friday (10/10/2014) we had the following presentations:

) Kienan Knight-Boehm - Parsing Wikipedia
2) Wyatt, Drake, John, Mason, Lavin - Aro CMS
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/aro-cms/ (Mentor Kevin O'Connor)
3) Robert Rouhani, Ariel Lee - SharpNav
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sharpnav/ (Mentor Kevin Fung)
4) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/
(Mentor Aaron Gunderson)
5)  Aesa Kamar, Elizabeth Dinella, Satoshi Masuura, Jake Mdogz -
MobaJoy http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobajoy1/ (Mentor Joshua Makinen)

Parsin Wikipedia is a fun project started to learn by doing (fusing the concepts of algorithms, parsing and data structures). He narrated his experiences of downloading incremental wikipedia files (huge) and how to edit/parse and getuseful information out of it. Finally he was able to take one wikipedia downloaded file and render it as a HTML file. 
His talk slides are found here http://slides.com/kienankb/hitchhiking-wikipedia
His takeaway point is -Homeworks are not as fun as doing projects and getting frustarted with and finally succeeding.
He prefers Hackathons. I thought RCOS provides sucha  forum - I could be wrong.

AroCMS is a new content management system written in javascript using mean stack (mongodb, express, angular and nodejs). It is simple, light weitght, usercentric, friendly UI and scalable. They have finished Plugin Recognition, Database binding, HTML compiler . They have to do plugin sandbox, implement ui and testing. Their talk slides are found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_V3UKRVUnFeJOqTJAlZM0siUHkfg_ScD7uivfkhwqGw/edit#slide=id.g48cc14245_148  It si a big project and needs user base to succeed. Hope this project achieves its goals.

SharpNav is going in full swing.He has released a0.9 version - has some bugs need to iron out the inks. Make it more unity friendly. His system seems to fill a void in the gaming community.

OpenLab is moving along well. He is making a good progess and showed a demo. There are some interesting problem that still remain to be solved. He showed a demo too,

MobaJoy is a project with an added hardware to play the league of legends game. They are resolving multiple inputs (frommouse and the hand held devise) to process the requests. They are making steady progress,

All in all I learnt a lot form listening to these talks and the perceptive questions asked by the students.

Week 7 (9/30/2014) and (10/3/2014) Fall Semester

We are at the half way point of our fall semester.   So many things are happening at RPI. Rensselaer magazine had a story about RCOS in the Fall 0214 issue (see the online version here )Things have been progressing along well. We had two meetings. http://hack.rpi.edu/ has been open for registartion.

On Tuesday (9/30/2014) we had these presentations

1) Robert Rouhani - Protips
2)  Daniel Baek  - PEP8: Python Coding Style

3) Peter Ryder, Blake Lingenau, Mike Macelletti - Check Up
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/check-up/ (mentor Devon Bernard)

4) Rob, Vijay, Ylonka, Jacob, Josh, Chandrika - EMTags
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/emtags/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

5) Brian, John, Zachary, Aleksey -  Where R U?
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/where-r-u/ (mentor Jim Boulter)

6) Alex White, Joseph Eduardo - Command Chain
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/command-chain/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

7) Dimitar Dimitrov and David Kim - Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/ (menotr Dimitar Dimitrov - self mentored?)

Lead mentor gave a nice presentation called ProTips - how to make RCOS expereience. His talk slides may be found here http://slides.com/robertrouhani/rcos-protips#/

Python coding style was presented -by Daniel. His talk slides may be found here http://www.slideshare.net/hydroArgentum/pep-8-python-coding-style

Checkup is a windows process monitor - improves what perfromance monitor task manager does - finer time intervals.
Their presentation is here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G_v-GhdKZpaGrXo2mMMVH6XU7r6-YqWNAImennmTO7Y/edit  - Very fine talk and work. As usual a number of interesting questions were posed and answers were very illuminating.

EMTags is a project to help emergency situations. Instead of paper, they want to have electronic tags. Their talk may be found here https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A4143B7E9F94CF58!65125&authkey=!AM9-pD53v9BK_PA&ithint=file%2cpptx

Whereare U is a mobile application for ride organizer with GPS and Map integration. It is better than a facebook group (answer to a question) Their talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rj39cVEMqbPKgDkt3YgT-SxPZYCRHCBzQpJsJIdszHI/edit#slide=id.p

Command Chain is a system to allow the requirements, deadlines and other notfications acceptable to a chain of commands. It is meant as a stand alone system,

Pierce Logic has progressed to a state whre it is close to release. Now they are working to port it to touch sensitive screens, Their talk slides may be found here (Oh! Oh!! Dimitar did not send in his lovely slides)

On Friday (10/3/2014) we had these presentations

1) Laurie Wu Robotics hand, Open Hand Model T42
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-hand-model-t42/  (mentor Devon
Bernard)  - No Blog posts?

2) Sebastian Sarbora, Jazmine Ollinger, Veronica, Dan, Charlotte -
Neptune http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/neptune/ (mentor Joshua Makinen)
- last three names do not appear in Observatory

3) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang - Pokemon RPI
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Jim Boulter)

Open Hand Project was a fantastic project and very well presented  This project is to build an open source hand (designed at HHarvard)There was veen a youtube video. Her talk slides may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dMUVrdHBYOFNsMjdka3BSbFlFdUJ0am9HLXJZ/view?usp=sharing 

Underwater Robotics is an open source effort to make a project and make it inexpensive. It also has a n added feature of wireless communication. Their talk slides may found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TtipVGssuieGE7SN4Wmnz4KPIIUVUAZY_VudGJOsrO4/edit?usp=sharing 

Pokemon RPI is an ongoing project the pokeman with RPI as map. They are progressing along well with an expected release at the end of Spring Semester. Their talk slides may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dNWVOdWQwQmVTYkZzZzVpTkNJWThwYXllOThV/view?usp=sharing

All the talks were fantastic and I learned a lot by attending these talks.