Week 14 (11/25/2014) Fall semester 2014

This is ou thanksgiving week. So we had only meeting this Tuesday. The following groups presented their talks

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

2) Branden Clark, Ze Qin, Toshi Piazza - Dynamorio
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/ (mentor Joshua Makinen)

3) Wyatt Kroemer, Drake Perrior-Small, John Drogo, Mason Cooper, Lavin
Aro CMS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/aro-cms/ (mentor Kevin O'Connor)

4) Alex Freska and Logan Shire - React/Grapefruit - (mentor David Goldschmidt)

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

Where  R U project is coming along well. They have not yet completed the project. Portions of it  are completed. They are building both IPhone and Android app for picking passengers for their rides. Thy also showed a demo. Their backend is also working.

Dynamorio poject involving fixing the various bugs.  They also showed a demo of the usefulness of DYnamorio in finding malwares. Their talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1aqjUm3ul1psUOTqGqfvGg9PxXMJ2PVvst-9ZDp6uLXI/edit#slide=id.p . A demo of using their program to detet malwares may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-QdHYf9NRFweEZfWXFBaVRvWlk/view (run time patching) - This is a tar gzipped file.

AroCMS has progressed further. They showed an alpha version of their program. They have api for various plug ins. They showed a cool demo. They used MEAN stak for their development. Most of it is in Javasript. I really hope that this project takes off.

Grapefruit/react project is going eally picking up steam. They have made a fast (reactive) GUI based on Javascript. - Most of the work is done in client side. Thei GUI also enables easier use of Grapefruit by the faculty members. Their project was liked by RedHat people and wanted them to showcase their project in SIGCSE conference.

Smart Schedule is more of a learning project. They are producing a calendar system for IPhone. They showed a demo. To make this project more interesting and different, they have to combine with weather indicator and availabilty indiator to predict about scheduling.  I doubt whether that will be done this semester or next.

There were many interesting questions as usual.  It was a time well spent and leanred a lot of new things. I wish I could retain most of the information! :(

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.