Week 13 (11/18/2014 and 11/21/2014) Fall Semester 2014

 Week 13 (11/18/2014 and 11/21/2014) Fall Semester 2014

Grapefruit Poster

Where R U Poster

This week was yet another hectic week  RPIHack went last week very well (thanks to the excellent organization by Jazmine, Robert, Sebabtian and Jacob). It was well covered in the local media 

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Students-hackers-test-their-mettle-at-RPI-5895847.php
http://www.troyrecord.com/general-news/20141116/rpi-hosts-inaugural-hackathon-hackrpi
http://albany.twcnews.com/content/785858/students-from-60-colleges-participate-in-hackrpi-event/
http://wnyt.com/article/stories/S3621561.shtml

Poly covered it here http://poly.rpi.edu/2014/11/19/rpi_hosts_first_hackathon/

We had poster presentation on wednesday - Some of the photographs are above. The posters were well appreciated by every one I talked. All these things make me blush - too much self - aggrandizing~

On Tuesday we had the following talks followed by RPIHack project talks:

1) Dennis Fogerty, Austin Gulati - Whats that Sample -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/whats-that-sample/ (mentor Severin
Ibarluzea )
2) Evan Thompson, Alex Vargas, Phil LaGambino, Tausif Ahmed - Spoiler
- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spoiler/ (mentor Jim Boulter)
3)Jorel Lalicki - #jorelsphone

Dennis and Austin are working on to recognize the music by a small sample. They have not scraped the music (and hence not populated their database). They are using a music sampling software library (could not get a demo working becaise of the change in ssytem). Hope they are able to pull off their project and come to a good conclusion.

Spoiler group is coming along - have implemented a few of the steps - logging of the speed seems to work. Their App will be a welcome to parents and friends of teenage drivers and inexpereinced drivers.

Jorel gave a design description of his phone - It is ambitious and has tools to electrical lab equioments. He has enough processing power. He seems to think that there is not much power consumption.

After these, Tho and his group talked about theor RPIHack project http://buzz-off.me/  an answer to clickbait infacebook. This is a chrome extension software. Joshua and his group talked about hdb (hilly billy debugger) which is a front end of a compiler placing print statements. Logan and his partner talked about their prize winning project (Humanitarian side) on an anonymous chat tool for LGBT community. Ji Woong Baek talked about a simple serial interface to Aurdino (please see here http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/audino/ ). All of them learned a lot of new things in RPIHack and did contribute to open source projects.

On Friday (11/21/2014) we had the following talks.

1) Kevin Zheng Lights Out - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lights-out/
(mentor Jim Bolter)

2) Peter Ryder, Blake Lingenau, Mike Macelletti -  Check Up -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/check-up/ (mentor Devon Bernard)

3)  Derek Meer and Michael Hosier - OpenWSN -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openwsn/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

4) Dan Baek, Robert Hannum, Jacob Abramson - RPI Mobile Dining Hall
Menu- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/ (mentor Dan
Baek)

5) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang - Pokemon RPI
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Jim Bolter)

Kevin Zhang release his beta version of Lights out (Andriod APP) to switch off lights in the car when one has reached the destination. His app does not consume that much power and has a number of features.

Check Up project (which is a combination of task manager and performance monitor) has come a long way. They are writing the script in a version of python. They showed an awesome demo.

OpenWSN (open wireless sensor network) is progressing along - mostly by providing JSON interface and understanding the code. This group also contributed some visualization. They are planning to develop a hardware with an open protocol stack.

RPI Mobile dining hall menu parser, despite the setbacks, has been coming along well. Robert has been writing his parsing software.There was a good suggestion to make his parsing task simpler. Jacobg is progressing along with incorporating sodexo menu in RPIMobile. The GUI needs some work, code cleaning - but a great progress.

PokemanRPI has been along well with custom map editor and the game engine They have a new member in their project. They are planning to release a version by the end of the Fall semester.

What a fantastic week with an active participation by RCOS students.

Week 10 (10/28/2014 and 10/31/2014) Fall Semester 2014

We are already two thirds of way into the Fall Semester. Thnigs are moving along. On Tuesday we had four talks

1) Michael Zemsky - BountyBB http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bandit/
(menor: Michael Zemsky- self mentored?)

2) Evan Thompson, Alex Vargas, Phil LaGambino, Tausif Ahmed - Spoiler-
 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spoiler/ (mentor Jim Boultier)

3) Lucien Christie-Dervaux, Leopold Joy, David Chen -  FoosRPI:
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/foosrpi/ (mentor Severin Ibarluzea)

 4) Nicholas Grippo,Sam Seng - Tag-It (Window-World)-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/window-world/ (mentor Aaron Gunderson)

Mike is working on BountyBB - a distributed file/data sharing platform. He is building a middle layer. He is yet to decidewhat networks to choose. Also the encryption schemes have to be ironed out. 

Spoiler is an ioS and android app to monitor and log driving speeds. They have implemented speed measurement and the logging systems. They have designed the overall system. They have a lot to impleent before the system can be released. They are hopeful.

FoosRPI is a  project to keep track of the scores on the foos tables. They showed a nice demo of the system using ardunio. They are well on their way to completing this project It is very ncie to see freshmen accomplishing so much

Tag it is a social netwrk application where people can tag objects/images/photos/three d- things and make a graffitti . This is a slightly different version of their original project.  The project is still a way to go. But they are making an effort.

 Friday,(10/31/2014) we had a guest speaker  Prof. Philip Guo.

Prof. Philip Guo ( http://pgbovine.net/academic.htm )  gave an inspiring talk about his research (HCI) and choices for graduate studies.

As usual there were a lot of questions and interesting suggestions