Week 12 (8/11/2015) SUmmer Semester

Summer Semester came to an end.  We had usual turnout (barring two singleton groups). Most of the groups  have contributed to the projects as much as possible. Avi pathched X11 code and he had submitted his patch. Congratulations Avi. Congratulations to every one who have made sincere effort to learn and work on their projects.

Off to Fall Semester!

Week 11 (8/4/2015) Summer Semester 2015

Summer semester is slowly coming to an end. Students have learnt a lot - both what to do and what not to do.  The students are working on their projects.  As I am struggling to learn new things, I understand the difficulties faced by the students.

I am looking forward to hearing thir final contributions next week.

week 10 (7/28/2015) Summer Semester 2015

The projects are coming along. wStudents are definitely learning. The outcome may not reflect what they have learnt. They are presenting their weekly updates in meeting.

With ony two weeks left, students have to finish their summer part of the projects. I sincerey that many students will accomplish what they set out to do.

Week 9 (7/21/2015) Summer 2015

Summer session is slowly coming to an end. The projects are proceeding along -
The students are working on their projects. All but one group had their presentations.
They are also anxious to bring their projects to completion.
 I suspect that we will get  at least (our usual) 30% success rate .

I hope the students learnt about working on open source projects this summer. Loking forward to thir "completed" projects soon.

Week 8(7/14/2015) Summer 2015

Summer Hackathon July 17, 2015 (with Princess)

Our meeting on 14th July(T - 10 on the pluto flyby and bastilles day) went off smoothly. We had people giving presentations on the status of their projects (sharpnav,tabletome, studybuddy, modular done, priorityQ, Eve Market Analysis, Memory Mason, Mozilla Servo). All the projects are plodding along (some  gallantly, some slowly) - All of them are making efforts - Hopefully we will have good projects to show by the end of this summer (in three weeks time! :( :) )

On Friday (7/17/2015) we had a hackathon in AE 214. Almost all the students showed up and worked on their projects. They were able to clear their doubts  from fellow RCOS-members. I made use of this time to prepare for my class. I think it was a great success. Having food was helpful.

I am looking forward to how their projects are going.

Week 7 (7/7/2015) Summer 2015

RCOS is progressing along well. Thanks to Robert Rouhani who is also helping with mentoring and generally helping  students.  He posted his last weeks talk http://slides.com/robertrouhani/dll-distribution#/

I briefly talked about the nine prisoners problem and how I modified Sudoku backtracking code to solve this problem. https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150609-a-design-dilemma-solved-minus-designs/  My comment appears toward the end (and my code is here https://www.dropbox.com/s/evlaru8lseif2hn/nineprisoner.c?dl=0 )

We are continuing in the style of small meeting format.

Jon gave an update of his Table Tome Project. He has been making a steady progress. He was working on authentication and login system. His slides may be found here. http://slides.com/jonathanwrona/table-tome-update

Avi talked about his servo project. He is implementing cut-and paste functionality. He is testing with a small sample code.

Michael talked about his drone project. The parts he has ordered have come. He explained the parts and the work he has got to do. His slides may be found here

https://rcos.slack.com/files/michaelgardner/F079TM0UB/presentation.pdf

Study Buddy Group gave the next presentation. They are progressing well as a team https://rcos.slack.com/files/m.kim.espinoza/F079V1FRR/study_buddy_week_6.pptx

Eve Online Market Analysis has a decent website working. They are planning to implement the backend in node.js and javascript with a  mongo db connection.

Finally Samuel talked about his priorityQ project. It is progressing along. He has shown a few screen shots. His talk slides may be found here https://rcos.slack.com/files/samuelyuan/F07A6SRJ9/priorityq_7-7_update.pptx

All in all, the projects seem to go well.

Week 6 (6/30/2015) Summer Session

Summer 2015 RCOS Students

Thanks to Dr. Goldschmidt for holding the fort for three weeks when I was way in India. He also changed the format - with the group being small we could afford to do it. Essentially our group meeting is like a small, we asked each group to update on their projects.

To start of Rob Rouhani talked about his game playing software (DLL libraries) and how to make a systematic method of generating DLL libraries for various operating systems. His software is being used bya number of people.

Modular drone project is waiting for the parts. Meanwhile they have been progressing with their control software.

Avi talked about his project. Though he did not make progress, his previous patch has been accepted.

Eve on line market Analysis talked next. They showed a static web page. They are having trouble with PHP.  David G has volunteered to help. They are also thinking of moving to Javascript and node.js

Sam talked about Priority Queue. He is making progress slowly but steadily. His webpage is complete. His system uses social aspects to calculate the waiting time.

Study Buddy presentatin went off well. They are making progress both in the backend as well as at the front end (Android).  They had some problem with Git - Luckily Avi was able to help them out.

Memory Mason did not have much to report (Aleksyhas been busy with courses). He has to shape up if he wants to accomplish anything with this project.

Week 2 (6/2/2015) Summer 2015

Week 2 came soon after the graduation ceremonies at RPI. A few students came for the first time this week. This was prearranged - due to getting a new apartment etc.

We had two presentations.

Jon Wrona talked about his summer project on Table Tome.. Here is project presentation https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xWeacB19U9Gus-67MMenb4ndFEALwdxSmUstlFIJdJ4/edit#slide=id.p  Main idea is to provide content of spell names using community based support.

Marina and Seema presented their project StudyBuddy an android application to motivate students to keep good study habits using a plant (as a  motivator).  They plan to use Java, XML and Unity (for plant animations).

I gave a brief talk on past projects and how motivation is an over riding factor in the success of RCOS projects

Week 1 Summer 2015 (5/26/2015)

Summer session started as soon as I have submitted my Spring semester grades. We have a low key summer with six or seven participants. Hopefully our funding situation will improve in future. As usual, we started the first week with proposed presentations.

Baek is working on an Arduino project involving DIY pressure sensors.
Hasselbach, Weiner and Hu are continuing with their EVE online Market Analysis tool. Their goal is to Multiplayer role playing game and predicting using the market data . They are also interested in making an educational tool for Management students. Samuel Yuan is working a website which will help users to choose a restaurant based on the waiting time. His plan is to include a social enabled website/app, Aleksey Klimchenko is continuing his work on Memory Mason. He wants to have the basic project completed to help with remembering disconnected objects.

Still in the learning mode!

Week 16 (5/12/2015) Tuesday Spring Semester

That is it. We had our last meeting on Tuesday - packed with talks - but not with audience :(

The following people/groups gave talks.

1) Ryan Trinkle '09 - Reflex: Practical Functional Reactive Programming

2) Leopold Joy, Lucien CD - FoosRPI-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/foosrpi/ (mentor Seve)

3) Sebastian Sarbora, Jazmine Olinger, Brittany Walker, Elizabeth
Dinella -  Neptune - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/neptune/ (mentor
Jazmine)

4) Alan Schimmel, Michael Hosier -  Mini BMS
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mini-high-power-battery-management-system/
(menotr Eric)

5) Chris Brenon,James Grippo,Kirk Smith,Richie Young - Ballotbox -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ballotbox/ (mentor Jim)

6) Joseph Monroe, Diego Cepeda, Vincent Cerati - Fitpet-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/fitpet/ (mentor Jazmine)

7)  Connor Foody, Jon Patsenker - Studyr
-http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/studyr/ (mentor Jim)

8)  - Yufan Lou, Xuan Liu, Nick Smith - YACS++CourseMap
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/coursemap-yacs-catalog/ (mentor Nick)

9) Ming Luo, Seve Ibarluzea, Zaran Lalvani, Forest Crossman and Matthew Vitting, Sia-UI  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sia-ui/ (mentor Kiana)

Highlights: 
Ryan gave a very nice and easy to understand talk on Reactive Programming using Haskell (web programming , streaming application).  He talked about his library Reflex which makes  this possible,

Leopold and Lucien have completed their FoosBall hardware software interface and had a youtube video of their project. They had used arduino, raspbery Pi , twilio, python for their system.

Much has been accomplished in Neptune - including simulation, hardware and interface. It is still some ways to go - 

MiniBatteryManagement System have fabricated an alpha version. They are refining their design. This project is coming along well.

BallotBox has made a very good progress. They have most of the basic operations working.

FitPet is an IPhone app that monitors the fitness activities using an incentive of pet living well.

Studyr is a project aimed at providing videos lecture notes, problem, past exams among students taking similar courses. The project is yet to mature.

Coursemap is coming along - they show a display of different courses according to the level credits and other filters - Right now it is just a circular display

Sia_UI is coming along very well with Seve leading the group. They have done a sizable portion of the UI implemented. There is also a simulation working. All in all, this project has achieved its goal (assuming the original Sia developers agree).

It is a glorious way to end the semester.

Week 15 (5/8/2015) Spring Semester

We are racing to the finish line. Mentors are playing a great role this semester. The small grop meetings really make a difference and get the groups going. They also help with the technology stack  that the students need.

We had these ten presentations on Friday:

 1) Theo Browne, Greg Bartell - inSquare
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/insquare/ (mentor Theo Browne)
2)  Shinya Hirata, Amartya Chakraborty, Aaron Cheng, Sensen Chen
-rClubs -  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-tradebook/ (mentor Jorel
Lalicki)
3) Mike Dewey , Mitch Mellone - Bluedash -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blue-dash/ (mentor Eric Oswald)
4) David Wang, Tommy Fang, Aman Zargarpur, Austin Gulati - Pokemon RPI
 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Samuel Yuan) - No
blog update
5)  Robert Rouhani, Shanye Jiang -SharpNav -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sharpnav/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)
6)  Derek Meer - OpenWSN - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openwsn/
(mentor eric Oswald)
7) David Chen, David Ivey, Joseph Shvedsky - Share-It:
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/share-it/ (mentor Brian Kelley)
8)  Sida Chen, Liyu Pan, Yitong Wu, Yuan Feng - Multi-Link -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/multi-link/ (mentor Brendon Clark)
9)  Ruben Madera, Cameron Root - Pentadactyl -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pentadactyl/ (mentor Theo Browne)

Some highlights:
inSquare has been downloaded a few hundred times - different clock faces (UI Design) for pebble watch. Programming is harder wth limited memory. Pebble has only two colors.
rClb showed a demo - They have done what they could. They showed fast/approximate search (search with spelling mistakes)
Blue Dash showed a demo. They have progressed well. This is for the formula SASE car. They created a custom dashboard with ardunio nano and blue tooth. It may have more general applications.
Pokeman RPI showed a demo. They have created all the basic block, They want to custom create the scenes with RPI background.
SharpNav has a number of contributors and users. So this project (finding paths) has matured .
ShareIt allows one to share the contacts, They use Ruby on Rails on the bakend and have Android and ios on the front end. Their slides are here http://slides.com/robertrouhani/sharpnav-8#/
OpenWSN group has designed a hardware chip and firmware for wireless sensor network. This project is working with UCB project on internet of things. Their slides are here http://slides.com/derekmeer/openwsn2015#/
Multi link allows one to get the status o various devies in one console. They started with peer to peer - settled on Client Server. They stil have some ways to go.
Pendactyl is a firefox plug in to have editor command to interact with a browser. They have done a good job of bringing this project to fruition. This group thanked their mentors.

Because we had a large number of presentation, we did not get as many questions as normaly we would. There were sufficient probing questions that heped the presenter as well as me.

I am happy with the way that the semester has progressed and ending!

Week 14 (5/1/2015) Spring Semester 2015

We have just two weeks left. We had a plateful of talks this week (like last week). Our room;s HDMI refused to unctiona nd people had difficulty using their mac.

1)  Gabe Perez - Shuttle Tracking
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/shuttle-tracking/ (mentor ?)
2) Dimitar Dimitrov, Eric Oswald - Autoroute
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoroute/ (mentor Dimitar Dimitrov)
3) Aleksey Klimchenko, Caroline Sullivan - Memory Mason -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/memory-mason/ (mentor Theo Browne)
4)  J Parker Hamren, James S. Miller - Image Comparison Library
-http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/high-level-image-comparison-library/
(mentor Robert Rouhani)
5)  Jon Wrona, Dan Lowe, Avi Singh Table Tome
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/tom/ (mentor Josh Goldberg)

All the presenters posted their slides before their talks in slack.
Gabe slides are her
 https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1j0-JavdaYvoUV_QqLsB8a6pi6MblgUh5iA9QJRHU5PU/edit Backend is done in MongoDB, Go and front end with Anguar. Gbe also worked in adapting RIT's opensource project Petitions for Students Union.

Dimiatr and Eric gave a nice talk on AutoRoute. https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1CKSJRbaJ53JkFLDlC4k0xI9255QGBADwldV9pcei_WY/edit#slide=id.p They have built the library. They are in the process of building binaries.

Aleksy and Caroline talked about their memory mason project (to enhance memory power) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1PYXm-B6LrYvsv4VlvUgm0VBQGJj3qv2c3CTZOODsQtM/edit They could not show the demo because of some technical glitch. They used Unity to build the GUI.

Parker and James talked about Image Comparison Library. They have developed some applications of OpenCV. Many features of OpenCV  have been used in their Java Package. They wil make an API once they complete Theor talk slides are found her https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1gtgTRTQ541fo0oNY9XWyahWQQiHYQ8B56cMm-Z9w6CQ/edit

Jon,, Dan and Avi talked about their TableTome project to create a toolbox for Dungeons and Dragons. They showed a nice demo oftheir project. They used MEAN stack. Their talk is posted here.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1fowKCl0C46bGfGQO_RqyiV6ng7l6pZKhLrDNa2Vb5T0/edit

There were many interesting questions. All good signs  we are making progress.

Week 11 (4/17/2015) Spring 2015

Spring semester is racing to a fast finish. Students are exceling in Hackathons, Research Symposia reaping awards.

We had four talks this semester.

1)  Charlie Machalow, Austin Henandez, Alexander White - cDashboard
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)

2) Shane Aston - Alien Spoilers
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alien-spoilers/ (Menotr Emmet Hitz)

3)  Sam Yuan, Yunang  Chin- GoMueller, Yijang Li -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/gomuller/ (Mentor Sam Yuan)

4)  Jake Martin, Erin Quin, Satoshi Matsuura, Noah Goldman -
OverNight: http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/overnight/ (no mentor yet!) -
Finalists in HackUMass!

Charlie, Austen and Alexander gave an update of their progress on cDashboard. Charlie is fixing bugs (improved menustrip artifacts and auto updates) adding minor features. Alexander is working on the easier plugin systems using MEF which enable dynamic plugins. Austen is working on cMaps using google maps api. He showed a nice demo.  Their talk slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ULtqhstfKuuvAWkI42V5118A6JW5M4qqRL4Kvu9mXcc/edit

Shane is working on a sytsem to prevent reading spoilers from reddit. He has a web application in which users can specify which reddit subgroups are not to be read. He showed a demo of his system and the technology used (Django, Python, SqLite and some other cool stuff) in the system. I hope  he posts his talk slides and updtae his blogs!

Sam Yunang and  Yijang gave a talk about their android app to help maintain a fixed exercise schedule. They showed a demo of their implementations done so far.  They plan to use qr code reader of the exercise machine which wil help in how to use the machine effectively. Their talk slides are found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17dJjhARUR3sYUemW32Vk9R7EQmi2BLXUuHWxy_LEEgI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p4

Jake, Noah, erin and Satoshi talked about their Overnight hardware app which will charge the android phone witout overcharging. They showed how Android phones hasve to be charged. Sice the charging is done  overnight, they couple an alrm with charging. Intially Android is charged at 50 percentage and a couple of hours before waking the android is charged at 100 percent. They are planning to make thieir hardware more robust and use an app to charge.  They also showed a demo of their project.  Pleae see their work at HackUmass http://hackumass-ii.challengepost.com/submissions and http://challengepost.com/software/overnight

Again a well spent Friday evening!

Week 10 (4/10/2015) Spring Semester

Sparse Attendance on 4/10/2015! :(

There has been very few students in our 10th April meeting and it was disconcerting (could be due to anumber of exams in this week). Hopefully they will catch up with their RCOS projects soon.

We had three talks this week.

1) Samson Bonfante - Digital Manufacturing -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/tsense/  (Mentor Sebatian Sarbora)

2)  Toshi Piazza, Richard Lin, Kevin Zhang and  Alex Shin -Toy Engine
- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/toy-engine/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)

3)  John Behnke and Zach Minster - Swift and You

Samson talked about his Manufacturing project (about digital signatures, compression and webservices) with Step Tools on Manufacturing. Martin pitched in and gave an overview of digital manufacturing and the role of open source software in that. Sams slides may be found here https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T033VT1N8-F04C648HT/download/rcos2.pptx

Toshi, Richard, Kevin and Alex taked about their toy engine. They have built a skeleton of their core and they even showed a demo. All of them are freshmen and it is great to see their progress.

John and ach magnanimousy pitched in to give the thirs talk. They showed the power of Swift (apple's new programming language). They showed a demo of the coof features of that language. Their talk slides are here https://slack-files.com/files-pri-safe/T033VT1N8-F04C8SF1M/swift_and_you.pdf?c=1428843115-39623421b21a049582adae1c9e05cf2c41779bae

A few members of RCOS group is going to HackUMass Saturday 11th April. Afew of RCOS students heped with Accepted Students Day. It is very nice to have such supporting Students. I will be remiss if I did not mention that a good showig by RCOS students on UGRS on April 8th.

Week 9 (4/3/2015) Spring Semester 2015

Spring break is over. We are on the stretch run. With so many end of the year activities  stdents re hard pressed for time. Hope we will have some successful projects  Out of the thee talks, only one was pertaining to a RCOS project. On the other hand, Eric, Josh, Seve and Kiana won th ebest education award in the recently concluded Hackathon at Binghampton.


1)  Adam Siemiginowski - Code for America Troy, Brigade and Hack Nights
2) Blake Lingenau, Dylan Lingenau, Michael Macelletti, Patrick
Hesselbach - Eve Online Market Analysis Tool - Big Data
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/eve-online-market-analysis-tool/
3) Josh Goldberg - JavaScript Sprites - The Hard Way

Adam gae a passionate speech about Code for America - Troy Brigade. Group in Troy wants to be the 57th brigade in the nation. They are planning hacknights to get the group an deadership team going. His talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1tjVrp6kMQMBK_j5xem3a6kHWKZmVVC4bQpRemEWWOzM/edit#slide=id.p

Many students were interested in woking with Code for America and taked to Adam personlly.

Blake, Dylan , Michael and Patrick about Ec Market Analysis tool - in a Big data framework. Their backend will be in C++ and the front end will be in python. They are getting the data in JSON format. If and when the need arises they plan to use MongoDB and a query language. There were many interesting and probing questions from the students.

Josh talked about using Javascipt to reerseengineer sprites and bricks of game of yore (like Mario Brothers and Pokeman ). He talked about his sprite design, algorithms he used and compression techniques. His talk slides may be found in the slack https://files.slack.com/files-pri/T033VT1N8-F049CQT8X/download/javascript_sprites_the_hard_way.pptx  A write up about his work on Mario (his project before joining RCOS) http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/17/this-college-kid-painstakingly-recreated-super-mario-brothers-for-the-web/

and http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/06/11/the-guy-behind-full-screen-mario-thinks-nintendos-mario-maker-looks-suspiciously-familiar/

Again a friday evening well spent listening and learning. I wish my ability to absorb new material and the detais quickly will improve than at the current moment,

Week 8 (3/20/2015) Spring Semester 2015

This is the Friday before Spring Break (we had a snow squall on Friday - I am reluctant to call it a Spring break) We had a sparse attendence with students going for Hackathon at BU, studentst attending a talk at RPI Security Club and of course students leaving for home for Spring break. We had two talks.

1) Aesa Kamar, Barry Hu , Johnny Chen -PokeAPI-v2
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokeapi-v2/

2)Brain Callahan (Graduate Student STS) OpenBSD, the proactively
secure Unix-like operating systeam and you: software used every day

Aesa and Barry talked about their PokEAPI-v2 - a centralized server which improves the PokeApI-v1 - They are building it on Ruby on Rails. They even showethey re-emphasized MVC with Ruby and he showed a demo connecting Octave to displaying grahs of equatons (with Ruby)

Brian gave a fantastic overview talk on FreeBSD. Brain is a vetetran FreeBSD developer and he is involved in Capital District and New York CIty BSD user groups. His talk slides may be found here http://devio.us/~bcallah/rcos2015.pdf

Hi stalk slides found its way to Hacker News soon after he presented at RCOS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9240533

All in all very nice talks to listen to before the spring break!

Week 7 (3/13/2015) Spring Semester 2015

The weeks are flying, I was feeling overwhelmed last week and hence did not write a blog.
Tuesday amlla group meeting with mentors seems to be ging well.

On Friday (3.13.2015) we had our usual meetings with the following speakers.

1)Rob Russo, Vijay Nambiar, Josh Baik, Ylonka Machado, Peter Ko -
Lapsus http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lapsus-linguae/

2)Joshua Makinen, Jim Boulter, Christina Hammer, Dennis Fogerty -
MeNext http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/

3)Branden Clark - DynamoRIO http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

Lapsus is a speech feedback to make better presentations.  They are using google speech API to analyze the speech and parse - give feedback to the user to impove ones public speaking ability. They even showed a small demo -  They have a web front end. They have a plan to complete this before the end of the semester.

MeNext has come a long way. Joshua is refactoring the backend. Jim is working on the IPhoen, Dennis is working on Android, and Christina is working on Windows Phone and Theo on the UI. They seem to be well onto theor way in making MeNext usable. Already it is on the AppSotr.

Breden talked about DynamoRio. He and his partners are making steady progress,. Bendan showed a nice demo of using DynamoRio for side attack.

I think we may have onlySeventy percent attendance - the course loads are picking up. Nevertheless who so ever came seem to be intrested in learning and asking intelligent questions and sharing their knowledge.

Week 5 (2/23/2015) Spring Semester

31 of 43 projects have been updated

26 of 43 repositories have been updated

16 of 43 blogs have been updated

I am just pasting the 5th week Observatory dashboard just to be proud of the students' accomplishments and hard work.

This week we had three talks.
1) Josh Goldberg - ASP.NET MVC
2) Brian Kelley, John Behnke, Zach Minster - Where R U? - Designing a
Cross Platform App

3) Aaron Gunderson and Nick Pitt - Basic Django

Josh talked about C # and asp.net and how the model view controller works. He gave  His homeworker as a demo using his methodology and technology stack. There were interesting questions and he answered them quite well.

Brian, John and Zach talked about building apps for IPhone and Andrioid. They emphasized the Dos and Donts in app building (mostly to conform with the standrads of respective platform and use of the libraries).

Aaron and NIck presented Django as a Model View Controller using Django. They had an application built using Djanago and helped explain the concept with that example.

All in all excellent talks. I wish I am faster to understand and experiment with their site/code. (That is my problem! :( )

Week 4 (2/16/2015) Spring Semester

We are already on the fourth week into the Spring Semester.

We did not have small group meeting this Tuesday as RPI has a mini winter break (Monday was Presidents day).

On Friday we had three speakers

:1) Colin Rice '14 - Internet Harder - AutoRoute
2) Rob Rouhani and Aaron Gunderson- Unit Tests
3) John Drogo- Mean Stack

Here is a twitter photo of Colin Rice giving the talk https://twitter.com/rcosrpi/status/568886071997702145/photo/1

Eric and Dimitar are working with Colin on this project http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoroute/  Idea behind this project is make the routing scheme finer and have some kind of cost mechanism (for packets) to make it to work is Blom filter (to stoe the BGP table efficienty).

Rob and Aaron gave a fantastic talk with continuous integration and unit test. I did not know till that talk that there is a utility you can integrate with Github (Travis-CI)  He has posted his slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yxSFWgp-u1vtA1ZEIXBQ62zEIhTgUBnJj3wyvM5onTg/edit?usp=sharing They also gave a live demo where unit tests failed and he modified the code to fix it. To effectively use continuous integration, one has to write unit tests.
https://github.com/rcos/VendingMachine

John Drago talked about MEAN stack (for web development) (mongo, express, Angular, nodejs) and how it is much better than LAMP Stack (linux,Apache, MySQL and PHP). He brought out the good aspects of nodejs (javascript intepreter meshes with Python) an dhow nonSQL database like MOngoDB one can have a dynamic database.  He showed a live graph demo with web crawers and it was quite impressive. I wanted to learn what he did (as it is something similar to what John Punin and I did a long time ago). I am waiting for his post.

All in all I learnt a lot from these meetings. Highlight of the meeting seems to be free google swags that they distributed at the beginning of the meeting.

Week 3 (2/13/2015) Spring Semester 2015

We have a snowy winter this semester. Irrespective of that, RCOS is going on strong. The mentors are meeting with individual groups on Tuesday. Hopefully the projects wil get closer attention and hence a greater output.

On Friday, we had three presentations:

1) Jesse Frietas- Designing Software Around Your Audience
2) Moorthy - Suggestions for making you and RCOS famous
3) Forest Crossman - Open Source Licenses

Jesse taked about the customers for whom the software is designed - How one should be willing to broaden the customer base. He also shared his expereince with his homework serever project.

I talked about the concerns the department and the recruiters have. I cajoed them to work hard and learn as many new things as possible. With the new mentorship, I do hope that the students will be given a close attention.

FOrest talked about the different OSI licenses. He mentioned the advantages and the disadvantages of each of the licenses. Hope he posts his slides soon.

Lead mentors (Aaron, Seve and Roibert) suggested a homework on git where in they have to add a project and the members in that project. Most of the students seem to have done - https://github.com/rcos/rcos-projects/tree/master/projects

Week 2 Spring 2015 (Week of 2nd February 2015)

RCOS meeting Friday 6th Feb 2015

Above is a photo taken on 2/6/2015 (Friday). We have around 158 students - The big problem of collecting all the URP forms and the project proposals was ably managed by David Goldschmidt. The mentors are chosen.

Mentors for Spring 2015

On Tuesday (2/3/2015) we had a few remaining project pitch presentations. David G gave a tutorial on how to fill the various forms and how to submit them. Then instructions were given how to get into slack (our chat forum - http://rcos.slack.com ), Observatory (http://rcos.rpi.edu ) , google groups  (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rcos-at-rensselaer ) and git set up. The paper work at RPI is sapping my energy!

On Friday (2/6/2015), we had one more project pitch presentation  (hopefully name of that project will change - D'oh - didn't know that meaning - till Rob told me the meaning - shame on me being a pseudo cruciverbalist :( ) . Theo and Josh gave a brief talk on Git and showed its power. They posted their slides to the group. Here is it Sevi and his partner gave a talk on socket.io (javascript socket - with node.js) and showed off their network game. RCOS students participated with gusto.

The mentors/projects list may be found here 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1myM_ju6PCRiy9pJZQosFju6cktbmjlH-jYNw7mirUpE/edit?usp=sharing

I am looking forward to the spring semester - with some trepidation.

Week 1 - Spring 2015 (Week of 26th January 2015)

First Meeting

Spring Semester has started with a bang on Tuesday 27th of January. We are meeting in DCC 318. As the above photo indicates the room was full of eager and talented students itching to develop open source code. Sophia, Robert and Sevi welcomed the group. I (Moorthy) gave the history of RCOS and Dave G talked about the forms and procedure. Robert  gave insurctions for the pitch day presentation. We had two technical talks one by Sevi and one by Jorel. Sevi taked about his work wih Sia during the winter break. Jorel talked about his company and how i is doing custom hardware design (and how it started from RCOS). By the way he was the only person who git a standing ovation from the audience.

Second Meeting on 1/30/2105

We had our second meeting (Friday 30th January). As the above photo indicaes, the interest is still high. We started off the meeting with a presentation by Graham Ramsey and Damian Matsylo on Grapefruit. They have made substantial contribution. A few professors are testing ou their software in class (Summer 2014 (Bridge Calculus Course by Piper) Fall 2014 and Spring 2015). They are carefully introducing features. They will be making a presentation the SIGCSE 2015 conference in Kansas during March 2015 (much thanks to REDHAT for sponsoing their trip).  Sophia and Theo talked about the help sessions they are organizing for new students. Their talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12sPVgxnMFOGJtcSeq8UUdz5hupKVN7SwS-IiEH44lwM/edit . They detailed what is a project  This was followed by project pitch presentation (one minute talk) by students. (Most of the students had originaly circulated their projects to RCOS mailing list and got feedback). The order of their presentation is here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NYX73rnYoSP7gHIavLL4r6p0Q9a0NpXODfF9hk950mU/edit#gid=0  and the actual pitch slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12Y-Ea_Ly4BejZSc5AKJ-zqgxUghmkhOLeCYs8np7Fos/edit#slide=id.g6db50ce5b_030  Pitch slides were very nice and the pitch presentations were very good.

Talks are in our youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/user/rcosrpi1 (Thanks to Gabe for recording and posting).

I do hope that the interests continue through out the semester and the students produce oustanding and useful open source software.