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.