Week 10 (4/2/2013) Spring 2013

Week 10 (4/2/2013)  Spring 2013

We have been progressing along and we are already on tenth week of the spring semester. It has also been very hectic - with the undergraduate symposium on Wednesday 4/3/2013. (we had 4 talks and 4 poster presentations from RCOS). 

We had two guest presentations and four students presentations.

1) Prof. Jason Kuruzovich (Guest speaker)

2)  Corey Leveen (Guest Speaker)

3) David Vorrick, Forest Trimble, Luke Champine, Sean Moran and Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi  Mkvsynth http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mkvsynth/

4) Colin Rice - Bit Toll  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bittoll/

5) Colin Kuebler - Koala http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

6) Tor Hagemann - libalexandria http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/libalexandria/

Jason talked about collaboration of RCOS and Servino center. Already many RCOS students participate with Servino center and the students.   He also encouraged RCOS students to participate in hackathon in Syracuse (NY) this Saturday. Also he was instrumental in adapting Observatory (dashboard software developed by former RCOS members Nate Stedman, Colin Sullivan and Tim Horton) for Foundry (Servino center). David Goldschmidt is on top of this collaborative effort.

Corey talked about his start up MuchMunch and pitched a CTO position for RCOS students.
You can see details about munch munch here  and its website is here

David, Forest, Luke, Sean and Wyler talked about their progress on video editor for linux operating systems. David has made progress on the back end.  The script end is going on well. The gui is also progressing well - They have almost demoed their system.

Colin R gave a scintillating practice talk (practice talk) for his UGRS presentation. Colin has progressed greatly and he gave a fantastic presentation. Colin R has used Haskell for implementation. He has almost completed his project.

Colin K has been working on web chat for programmers using Javascipt (and node.js) - He demoed his system. Colin will eventually integrate this in his Koala system. This will enable easier co-operation among novice/inexperienced programmers.

Tor talked about his libAlexandria project. Tor has more or less completed his libraries. Currently he has been hoping others will use his library for machine learning tasks.

As usual we had a fascinating session with lots of interesting participation/questions/suggestions from students. As usual I learned a lot.

Week 4 (2/12/2013) and (2/15/2013) Spring 2013

Week 4 (2/12/2013) and (2/15/2013) Spring 2013

The weeks are rolling by too quickly. We had two meetings this week. On Tuesday, we had talks by

1) Prof. Fran Berman  - Big Data Government Intiative

2) Asher Glick and Matt Zanchelli - pascode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ios-passcode/ and othe pass code 

3) Tor Hagerman libAlexandria 

4) Colin Kuebler Koala  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/

5) Ryan Maxfield IPhone app

Prof. Berman talked about the international efforts in having an infrastructure set up for sharing data. She is leading US efforts. She mentioned that this effort may be similar to the internet initiative taken during 70's and 80's. Lots of interesting things need to be resolved (a lot of social and technological problems) - She encourages students to  contact her.

Asher and Matt talked about their combined efforts to making an easy pass code application that works in browsers for various domains (freeing the users of remembering the passwords). They showed a demo of their system. There were lots of interesting questions and suggestions (including to have an API)

Tor talked about his system level design for his machine learning library (like library of Alexandria) it is a library of libraries).  Tor follows a data flow model for his library - He has done a lot of commits to the repository. He is planning to build an end to end system,

Colin Kuebler presented his Koala System. He has been working on this for three semesters. He hopes to release of his software, get feedback of his system. He is planning to develop a community website.

Ryan talked about finding crab buoy application for IPhones. He outlined the importance of finding crab buoys. He is using customized GPS hardware in the buoys. There were a number of suggestions.

On 2/152013, we had two talk by RCOS alumni

1) Peter Hajas '12

2) Tim Horton '11

Peter talked about the importance of contributing to RCOS projects. Sharing and contributing enables one to be more visible in the community (as well as making RPI and RCOS more visible).

Tim talked a very large open source project webkit http://www.webkit.org/ and how he has been contributing to it. He encouraged every one to make contribution to some (large)open source project (may be webkit too)

I will also recommend reading these two blog posts (by Tim Horton)

http://www.hortont.com/blog/on-rcos-and-getting-a-job/

http://www.hortont.com/blog/on-rcos-or-open-software-at-rensselaer/

 

All in all, it was a fantastic week.