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! :)

Videos of Talks given during Week 6 Summer 2012

Videos of Talks given during Week 6 Spring 2012

Thanks to Dave G for "pinch hitting" me during last Friday meeting. Thanks to Jorel we have all videos up to week 6 uploaded to youtube. rcos channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1 .

1. Dr. Louis Ibanez (kitware) - (Guest Speaker) Who writes Linux Kernel

2. Jim Kalfas - Olympus  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/olympus/

3. Dan Vegeto and Rob Hoolinger -collective congress  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

4. Jeongmin Lee  Datacube Browser http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/datacube-browser/

5. Steve Klenkar Open Legislation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlegislation/

6. Kevin Baker Rensselaer Frequency ID http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/

Week 6 (6/29/2012) Summer 2012

Week 6 (6/29/2012) Summer 2012

We are roughly at the half way point in our calendar year and middle of summer semester. We hada very hectic week with six scintillating talks.

1. Dr. Luis Ibanez (kitware) - (Guest Speaker) Who writes Linux Kernel

2. Jim Kalfas - Olympus  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/olympus/

3. Dan Vegeto and Rob Hoolinger -collective congress  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

4. Jeongmin Lee  Datacube Browserhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/datacube-browser/

5. Steve Klenkar Open Legislationhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlegislation/

6. Kevin Baker Rensselaer Frequency IDhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/

Luis gave an inspiring talk about the community aspect in Linux Kernel Development. He emphasized how the kernel development is not monopolized by any company or any one. He also made a point that all projects have the potential to be much bigger than originally planned.

Jim is continuing last summer's project of Asher and Gabe in getting the front end working for server management.(Backend was completed by Asher and Gabe). Jim is using HTML 5, Javascript to accomplish his front end and webinterface.

Dan and Rob presented their project on Collective Congress (continuation of Dan's Spring Project). This project has come a long way. Rob is integrating the data with googleappengine and Dan is working on the front end. They even had a nice demo in which the group voted whether the keep the laptop open or not during RCOS meeting (as a side note, since the question was not formed well, I do NOT know what the students voted for).

Jeonming has been working on the datacube browser - providing different types of visualizations on RDF marked input. Jeoming also showed a cool demo. He is continuing his work with more data and a wide variety o data (including csv data)

Steve is working with NY State Legislation project. Steve is going to provide a better user interface both for expert users and for novices. He plans to have additional visualizations with calender events, bill proceess graph among other things.

Kevin is working on RFID reader chip. He has already designed and the hardware had come. Kevin is planning to test the chip as well as provide cases for both serial and parallel interface. The idea is to use the chip in place of iclicker and for taking attendances. Kevin also showed a very cool demo (and explained the principles of RFID reader). Kevin has also posted his talk slides (Hint to others - please post the slides).

I was very glad to see a number of questions and suggestions from the students. All of them are willing to help and share their knowledge. My only (a big) mistake was to schedule so many talks one day.

Video of Week 5 talks

Andrew Djinta

Brian - RQ



Ari - RNA Simulation with SimTK

Deon - Syllabuson Rails