Week 7 (3/5/2013) Spring 2013

Week 7 (3/5/2013) Spring 2013

We are at the midpoint of the semester - The projects are coming along well. There has been code/blog updates despite homeworks/projects/tests. We had six talks this week.

1) Bharath Santosh, Dimitri Dimitrov, Benjamin Caulfield, and Tim Slowikowski  Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

2) Bharath Santosh,and Diogo Moitinho de Almeidad  ProtoML http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/protoml/

3) Timothy McMullen - Awesome Wav http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/awesome-wav/


4) Vera Axelrod and Andrew Karmani   Yet another exam scheduler (YAExs) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/yet-another-exam-scheduler-yaexs/

5) Deon Robinson FastAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

6) Asher Glick, Jerome Schneider, Elizabeth Towns, Andrew Karmani, Avi Weinstock - BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

Bharath, Dimitiri, Benjamin and  Tim talked about their progress in Peirce Logic Proof system. This project has been progressing along  They even showed a demo. They are also planning tutorial as well as several example proofs.

Next Bharath and Diogo talked about their protoML library. They have been making fantastic progress. They also showed a demo of their project. More than that they (along with Deon and Zachary)gave their impressive performance in http://www.kaggle.com/competitions Kaggle Competitions.

Timothy has been progressing making Awesome Wav parallel. In the process he has also removed as many bugs as he can. He us using pthread libraries and parallelizing I/O file operations. He showed a demo and hopes to collect metrics on speed up due to parallelization.

Vera and Andrew talked about yet another exam scheduler. They are using integer programming (open source) solver and use a warm up start (since the solution may take several hours). They also have a front end where department administrators can interact with the system. They are working on the permission setup and a fine tuning the bac-kend.

Deon talked about his FastAPI to recognize images taken from android phone. He is using open source image recognition algorithms for obtaining features of images.. His system compares with  millions of stored images and comes up with answers an scores of their answers. He showed a small demo of his system.

Finally Asher and Beth (and Avi) talked about their Briefcase project. They have made substantial progress with their system. Multiple edits work (currently for their spreadsheet).  They are releasing an API to be used with other file sharing systems. They are also working on documentations and commenting the code.

I learn a lot from the question answering sessions (from the perceptive questions and suggestions from the students stretch ones realize/appreciate different facets).  Nice evening well spent and as usual my horizon has expanded. (The way my horizon is expanding I may go to different galaxy soon! :) )

Week 13 (11/27/2012) Fall 2012

Week 13 (11/27/2012) Fall 2012

This week was the penultimate week. Every one is hard pressed for time. Exams, projects and other projects keep all the students very busy. I am glad at least a few students volunteered to give presentations of their projects. The students who presented include:

1. Asher Glick BriefCase and other side projects http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

2. Zhixun(Andrew) Wang Djinta and other side project http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

3.Bharath Santosh, Dimitre Dimitrov on Peirce Logic
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

4. Jerry Schneider Emulator http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-emulator-project/

Asher gave an update of their Briefcase project. It looks all the pieces are done now. He did not have server running to give a demo. By all accounts a version of briefcase (with multiuser editing and code highlighter) is working now. Hopefully it will be released before beginning of Spring Semester. If I understood his talk properly, Asher's briefcase can also be used for concurrent code editing. Asher also talked about his comment making program. It is a small light weight tool and does cool things. Better yet, this tool has been used at least by one other person!.

Zhixun briefly mentioned one additional feature (of calculation) in his Djinta project. He talked out his other project of users distinguishing between TED http://www.ted.com and Onion (spoof of TED) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/the-onion-eviscerates-social-media-experts_n_2188593.html

Zhixun has created a website with links to two videos and ask users to identify which one is which - Then he said it may be viewed as a classification problem (and use machine learning techniques).. Zhinxun gave a cool demo of his website (uses sqlite and jquery) with a provision of users to provide inputs for links to TED and onion videos.

Bharat and Dimitre gave a presentation of Peirce Logic. They have a come long way. Their system is almost to be used by the cognitive science course (from where the idea for this project came).  They gave a nice demo of the functioning of their system (storing of proofs and retrieving old proofs is in the works). But their undo feature (which they implemented) is very nice.

Gerry gave a presentation of yet another side project of his namely Emulator project. He has implemented a lot more games, cleaned up the code have a working timer. He gave a demo which is very impressive.

There were more side projects presentation than actual projects. That is fine - as long as some useful code gets generated. It will be nice to have progress with original projects also.

Week 1 Fall 2012 (9/3/2012)

Week 1 Fall 2012 (9/3/2012)

Eager to Code, Eager to Share and Eager to Help - Fall 2012

Actually this is the second week of the semester - we are still ironing out the meeting, project submissions and a lot of other details. Dr. David Goldschmidt will be joining as an expert adviser. Welcome David G! As usual we have a wonderful group of volunteers/mentors to help out. For the rest of this semester, we will be meeting in AE 216. If luck will have it, RCOS may have space - let us keep our fingers crossed!

We had three talks.

1. Jerry Schneider talked about his emulator project. http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-emulator-project/ Jerry has become an expert in web development/webapps after his summer internship.  He has implemented a chip 8 simulator using javascript and HTML5 (with CSS) (his other goal is to simulate Atari 2600).  He has implemented a number of games and other rcos-ists have contributed his project. he showed a demo and it looked awesome. Jerry also plans to continue with his BlueMesh project. 

2. Asher Glick talked about his BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/ - Asher is going for a big push with BriefCase - His project has attracted a number of students.  His ambition include code editor and presentation maker. All of them come with distributed editing. He has moved his git repo to a common place.

3. Jorel talked about his project with TILaunchpad http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/ He is closed to getting a kick started campaign. He and Tim are going to go to New York City for the maker faire http://makerfaire.com/newyork/2012/index.html - They are having a booth with their  LaunchPad (hopefully coinciding with their kick started campaign).  Jorel gave an illuminating demo with LED and remotely controlled (pun intended).

We have an enthusiastic group and hope their enthusiasm turns into useful software/hardware projects.

12th week (8/10/2012) Summer 2012

12th week (8/10/2012) Summer 2012

We had our last group meeting this week.  We (students and I)  had a blast this summer.  The students had a fantastic commitment and it showed in their projects.

We had a record number of talks (we broke the record of last week) of talks. We went from noon to 2:00 p - most of the students stayed back to listen (the donuts, soda in addition to pizza helped a bit :) )

The presenters were:

1) Zachary Clapper Touch of Mathematics http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/touch-of-mathematics/

2) Dan Vegeto and Rob Hollinger Collective Congress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

3)  Jorel Lalici and Tim Cantwell TILaunchPad http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/



4)  Bobby Zheng Sage - geocoding http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sage-senate-address-geo-coding-engine/


5) Jim Kalfas Olympus http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/olympus/


6) Jeongmin Lee CubeBrowser

7) Brian Barnes RQ  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/ 

8) Alex Freska FlowUR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

9) Asher Glick BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

10) Ed Leslie Fenestra http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/fenestra/

11) Andrew Bolin  PortSim http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/portsim/

12) Kegham Khosdeghian and (Austin McGuire)  milkyway@home http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome/




With twelve talks, it is almost impossible to summarize these talks. I will try (like a fool!)

Zach has done his share (or will be at the end of summer) for MathTouch - His demo for algebra was nice (with history and redo/undo feature). Will be a useful tool for children in beginning Algebra

Dan and Rob showed an interesting demo of Collective Congress.  A very clever demonstration of the powers of their system (barring not sending the email) it work very nice. Students came up with good suggestions (string duplication and approximate string matching)

Jorel and Tim stole the floor with their final(4!) presentation. They are planning to start a kickstarter company. I was moved when gave me a LED name tag. Their website (opensource hardware) http://www.lib3.com/piled/ - Please support this company!

Bobby talked about his GeoCoder project using tiger data base. He has to do a nontrivial job splitting the  street names. He makes of Python shape libraries(?) and his code is (naturally) in python (still needs to compile!) . His program will connect to a Java program (front end)

Jim talked about Olympus front end contribution. His gui and a couple of plug-ins are working (a couple needs more work)

Jeonming has been making progress with his heath visualization (in semantic web) using twitter feed. He showed an excellent demo.

Brain talked about his project RQ. Q (queuing for his winamp) works. R (remote) part needs to be completed (hopefully will be done before the end of summer). He has posted his presentation slides here http://www.slideshare.net/BriGuy92/rq-second-presentation

Alex has been making a very good progress with his FlowUR project. he hopes to release the software before the end of summer. There are many good suggestions from students.

Asher has been making a good progress with his Briefcase project (he has a new syntax highlighter) - a number of students are interested in working on this project. He is breaking into front end and back end parts.

Ed showed his lightwieght windowing system based on X. It has a few bugs - otherwise works very well. He plans to port to other window manager (whose name I forget - a sort of competitor to ratpoison)

Andrew showed off his simulation of generating stock profile data (random). He plans to parse the real data file that he gt recently. Andrews progress is quite nice.

kegam spoke his Milkyway@home project. Kegam is trying to port n body simulation to GPU with double precision and Austin is doing nonintrusive visulizations. They are making excellent progress!

Whew - that is a whole lot of summary! It was an excellent semester and every one learned a ginormous amount! :)

9th week Talk Videos Spring 2012

9th week Talk Videos Spring 2012

Thanks to Jorel, we have videos of talks presented during 9th week. We have had busy two weeks - there were many Talks, presentations and Posters besides our usual quota of home works, exams, projects. We all survived that!

We had two talks

1) Jerry Schneider, Trevor Zettersten, Sean Chase on Blue Mesh,

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/


The talk video may be found here:




2) John Wason's talk on Robotics - Recruiting for projects. This is John Wen's Lab




3) Asher Glick and Elizaeth Towns on Briefcase,

http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/