Week 5 Spring 2012 (2/24/2012)

Week 5 Spring 2012 (2/24/2012)

This is the first time (during my career at RPI), we truly have a spring semester (not a winter semester disguised as a spring semester!) The students at RCOS are doing great work - all their projects progress reports have green and smiley faces and their presentations have been excellent. Hope I am hoodwinked :).

This week we had four more excellent presentations:

1) Peter Hajas, Jeff Hui - Genesis http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/genesis/

2) Alex Hunt/ Jon Kriss, Android Math Notebook http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/android-math-notebook/

3) Matt Zanchelli -Blog.txt http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blogtxt/


Safari Passcode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/safari-passcode/

4) Zach Fry, Bobby Zheng - Chronicle http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chronicle/

Peter and Jeff gave their excellent presentation on Genesis - an IPhone application to be on the road editor for code to fix "mission critical" bugs on the road. They have already implemented part of their system and showed a demo. Peter talked about the front end of the system (including code highlighter, on the fly editing) and Jeff talked about the backend - how genesis communicates with outside world. As usual there were interesting questions and good suggestions from the audience.

Alex and Jonathan talked about Android Math Notebook. Their project is to enable taking (math) notes online easy. They are using one source handwriting toolkit for hand written recognition. This will be critical for the success of their project (both in terms of speed and accuracy). By making this an external module, they can concentrate on other things. They have implemented a gui. They are progressing quite well. Hoping to see great things from this accomplished group.

Matt Z is the next speaker. He is a freshman and he exudes an infectious enthusiasm that others could emulate. He talked about three projects. He has implemented a customizable password using master password in Safari. It is implemented in Javascript.
Matt gave a demo of his project. Matt Z is making sure that the security of these passwords are not compromised.

Then he talked about his other project blog.txt - It is the "easiest" blog writing system. When a plain text is dropped into his program, it is nicely formatted and a blog appears. Matt gave a demo of this system too. He is currently trying to enhance this software to do "more" things easily. Matt Z also briefly talked about his third project on cloud system. It is still in the design stage.

Bobby (and Zach) talked about their Chronicle System. Their system (based on android) will enable video taping lectures, tagging the segments and searching. They have implemented some of the components of their system. Rigt now, their design is based on wifi for bandwidth reasons. Hoping to see great progress in their useful (to all of the students) system.

All the presentation were well thought out and well delivered. All the projects have users in mind in their design. I hope that these projects take off big and have the largest user base.

Week 3 (2/10/2012) Spring 2012

Week 3 (2/10/2012) Spring 2012

RCOS has been going strong. We have a lot of students participating at RCOS - more than that they are very enthusiastic on coding.

This week, we had five talks

1) Jerry, Shawn and Trevor on BlueMesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

2) Asher and Beth on BriefCase http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

3) Christian, Dan, Mike and Luke on DaBuzz http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dabuzz/

4)Colin Kuebler on Syntax Highlighter http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

5)Colin Rice on BitHopper http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/



After the group photo was taken, we got down to talks.

Jerry, Trevor and Shawn talked about their Blue Mesh Project. They have redesigned the project (their project uses polling) and implemented most of it. They are still testing. Jerry and Trevor are doing the back end, having blue mesh connection and Shawn is developing applications. Because it is based blue mesh, the system users have to be with in 20' of each other. There were a lot of penetrating questions by the students as well as excellent suggestions.

Asher and Beth continue to work on Briefcase, an open source version of Google Docs (for spread sheets). Beth is working on the backend (using Djanago and a data base) and Asher is working on the front end. The client code allows users to write API's (Zach Clapper has developed Math Javascript libraries). Colin Kuebler is helping with Syntax highlighting. They are also developing an open source code collaborative tool.

Christian, Dan, Mike and Luke talked about DaBuzz, is an application to gauge the market's perception of the stock market. They have to select which financial articles to scrape, to do sentiment analysis using NLTK, to select which stocks to
analyze and use machine learning to further refine and have a web front end and cloud storage. It is a daunting task and with four talented students working, I am confident that good software will come out of this.

Colin talked about syntax highlighting. He uses regular expressions to identify tokens. Colin uses a clever algorithm to recompute only the selected code that has changed since. Colin uses this syntax highlighting for his project on Koala. COlin gave a demo of his system and it works pretty fast.

Colin Rice, talked about his project BitHopper about how to make money from BitCoin. Even though this is Colin's first RCOS project, he has already established himself a great open source devloper and has a large following. Colin has developed his software based on sound mathematical ideas and clever algorithms. There were a few questions mostly about ethics and the algorithms used by Colin.

Overall, it is a fantastic set of first talks by the students. Hope this continues for the rest of the semester.