Week 12 (11/20/2012) Fall 2012

Week 12 (11/20/2012) Fall 2012

With the thanksgiving week around the corner, many students had gone home. With the help of Christian I tried to stream the talks using google hang out - The idea was good - but the audio was not great. Above is a proof (Shawn is giving his talk) my attempt to stream the video. 

The following students presented their talks.

1) Shawn Denbow and Brendan Clark Dr. Memory
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

2) Alex Freska,Patrick Teague and Brian Le Flowur
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

3) Zach Clapper Penguin Electronics Inventory Management System
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/

4) Jorel Lalicki - PILED, Corsair,
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/
 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi..

5) Jeremy Schneider - Rock Scissors Paper - learning game https://github.com/schnej7/RockPaperScissors

Shwan gave a talk outlining the progress. His reverse engineering is going well. Brendan is learning the ropes - learning how to deassemble the code.

Alex and Brian talked about the progress of Flowur - their flowchart program. But for the edge connections to block everything else is going smoothly - They have a few templates. They hope to release a version before the calendar year end.

Zach is continuing his project on Penguin electornics Management System. Zach is working on Javascript front end and it has been going well. He hopes to have a version readyby the end of the academic year.

Jorel was successful in getting his kickstarter project funded. he plans to get the board fabricated and ship out the product by February. Jorel and Tim are making the tutorial for TILaunchpad. Jorel talked about his Corsair project. He is planning to use node.s and his initial design and partial implementation is completed. Jorel is ambitious and he wants to have corsair deployed before Spring semester.

Jerry talked about his learning program to play rock paper scissor game. He has developed many schemes and he is currently ranked 7th. He talked about various strategies he has employed. As I write this blog I read an article in http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html todays newyork times about the importance of deep learning!

Even though there were not that many students attending the talk(rightly so), I greatly enjoyed the talks and the ensuing discussions. 

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

We are in the midway point of the semester. RCOS projects are going well and the students are spending time with courses and projects. This week we had two talks. We are glad to have a past RCOS student to come and give a talk. 

1. Jorel Lalici is working on CORSAIR According to Jorel "the software I am working on is instead focusing on facilitating freedom of speech in an academic setting. The intended use would be to share notes and materials for courses, as well as host an open discussion forum. CORSAIR has no public facing page, or server. The authentication server has no indication of what is on the server, and is only contacted as needed (if no nodes can be automatically discovered). As it is entirely p2p, it does not directly facilitate sharing of anything to the public. As CORSAIR actually significantly limits the scope of FreeNet (removing a lot of features and restricting the network to subnets), while merely adding a more user friendly interface tailored to use for academic materials, it actually removes much of the ability for CORSAIR to be misused." -  Knowing Jorel I am hopeful that CORSAIR will be useful not only to RPI community but to the whole free world.  There were many interesting questions and discussions to Jorel's talk.

BTW Jorel has a kickstarter campaign for his Piled Project. Here is the URL  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi?ref=card

2. John Britton who is working as a GitHub liaison with educational institutions gave a whirl wind tour of GitHub. As usual his presentation was lucid and crisp.  The students being intimately familiar with GitHub were able to understand every word of it. Further many interesting questions were asked.

We had an overflow of students listening to the talks in AE 216.