Week 1 Spring Semester 2013  (1/22/2013)

What a glorious way to start a new semester - that too at the first day of classes. Dr. David Goldschmidt is sharing many of the duties. It is a great help for me. We have a large number of students showing for our first meeting (some new and some old faces). With this large number, we have to move to a larger room, AE 214, which will be our abode this semester. Hope the interest is maintained for the rest of the semester and some awesome open source software gets developed.

Past mentors started off the meeting welcoming all students and encouraging students to learn, share,  write blogs and push their code. Hope every one listens to them!  Dr. Goldschmidt presented with a number of announcemnets and dates. Here they are (Thanks Dr. goldschmidt for following up):

(1) If you haven't already done so, please register for CSCI-4963 RCOS
 (it's a 0-credit course that helps get us a room allocation, among
 other things).  We're up to 48 enrolled last I checked!

(2) Be sure you have your form(s) in before the Add deadline (Mon
 2/4).  You must fill out the URP application (due 1/28).  And if you'd
 like credit rather than pay, you must also fill out an Independent
 Study form.  These can be signed by Moorthy or me -- check our
 websites for office hours (or hit us up at the next RCOS meeting).
 MORE DETAILS at http://rcos.rpi.edu/howtojoin/ (which also describes
 the all-important proposal).

(3) Anyone who'd like to be a mentor, please email Moorthy and I by
 the end of this week.

(4) I'm way desperate for a Drupal expert to help teach how to
 administer a simple Drupal site -- probably an hour or two in the
 McNeil room at some point soon (your schedule).  Free food!  Please
 email me.

(5) If you'd like to be on the new RCOS OFFICE SPACE committee (we'll
 use both our brains and our brawn to get AE205-207 set up for RCOS),
 please email me.  We want to have a "grand opening" in March and make
 a big deal of it!

Here's a list of upcoming events we need to have a strong showing at:

(a) Black Family Technology Awareness Day (BFTAD) is Saturday 2/2 from
 9am to 5pm.  Please email Sharon Simmons (simmos2@cs.rpi.edu) to help
 out.  FREE LUNCH!  And as I mentioned, you'll see President Jackson
 lead the Electric Slide!  Woohoo!  Seriously, though, please attend if
 you can and help by showing some of the interesting/cool projects you
 are working on.  The theme is "Connecting Minds to STEM through Music
 and the Arts" -- though any cool stuff we're doing would be great.
 Sharon can describe the event in more detail -- it's a great event, so
 I hope to see you there.  Did I mention free food?

(b) Don't forget the Career Fair is 2/13-14 at the Armory!

(c) Prepare for poster sessions -- in particular, in mid-March,
 there's the Undergraduate Research poster session.  Make yourselves
 and RCOS look really really good.

(d) Also, there's Accepted Students Day on 4/13, where we also do
 poster sessions and welcome accepted students, trying to convince them
 to come to RPI, do CSCI (!), RCOS, etc.  More free food.

(e) We need to schedule a HACK-A-THON -- let's discuss dates for this
 at our next meeting.

We then have a 1 slide presentations by various groups presenting projects ( idea was to encourage feedback and to attract new developers (who have not chosen a specific project) for working on these projects.

We had presentations by

• Jerry Schneider/Zachary Jablons - Blue Mesh

• Vera Axelrod, Andrew Karmani, Colin Steifel  - Yet Another Exam Scheduler
•  Celi - Ruby On Rails Top Soil
• Emily Anderson, Sean Chase and ? - Lasers and Logic
• David Vorric, Sean Moran, Luke Champine, Forest Trimble - Linux Video Processing
• Beth Werbenath - Kinect Gestures Library
• Jorel Lalici - Cost Effective Spectrometer
• Bharath Santosh, Diogo Almeida - ProtoML - Rapid Prototype Machine Learning Python Library
• Ethan W and Nikhil Srinivasan - Baby Notes (IPhone app for child care)
• Colin Rice - Bit Troll - Secure ssh for BitCoin
• Daniel et al - Rating system for Game Streamers

All the presentations are well received. Please submit your completed URP's to Dr. Goldschmidt or to me before the end of Thursday (last day)







Week 14 (12/4/2012) Fall 2012

Week 14 (12/4/2012) Fall 2012

This is the last week of presentation for Fall Semester. Not every one presented their second round of talks. The fall semester also rushed by too fast with so many activities.We had six presentations this week..

1) Dan Vegeto, Chris Higley. Rebecca Nordhauser and jesse Freitas, Collective Co                            ngress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

2) Rachel Redner, Nick Timakondu, and Asher Glick Zadatak
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

3) Mike Agnew  ReserveMe  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

4) Brian Barnes and Joshua Mackinen RQ http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/

5) Sheena McNeil koob kooc - Reverse Cookbook
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/

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

Dan Vegeto tried to give a demo of the current version of his system. It seems to have a nice feature - But could not appreciate the full feature because of an email glitch.

Rachel, Nick and Asher presented Zadatak - Unfortunately could not appreciate their contribution because of the lack of a cable.

Mike Presented his current status - he is currently formatting the various forms to be submitted.

Brian and Joshua could not proceed much with the project because of understanding javascript details.

Sheena presented Reverse Cookbook - she has implemented many of the features - could not appreciate because of a server crash just before the presentation.

Colin presented his Koala project and his recent accomplishments. He showed a demo and he has many more features including a community website up his sleeve.

Students worked very hard - unfortunately they were unable to show off their accomplishments for reasons beyond their control. Asher gave a wise advise to maintain a weekly schedule and what if scenarios to those  students who plan to finish much of the work during the winter break.

Good Luck and Happy New Year and Holidays to all of you -

Week 13 (11/27/2012) Fall 2012

Week 13 (11/27/2012) Fall 2012

This week was the penultimate week. Every one is hard pressed for time. Exams, projects and other projects keep all the students very busy. I am glad at least a few students volunteered to give presentations of their projects. The students who presented include:

1. Asher Glick BriefCase and other side projects http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/briefcase/

2. Zhixun(Andrew) Wang Djinta and other side project http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

3.Bharath Santosh, Dimitre Dimitrov on Peirce Logic
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

4. Jerry Schneider Emulator http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-emulator-project/

Asher gave an update of their Briefcase project. It looks all the pieces are done now. He did not have server running to give a demo. By all accounts a version of briefcase (with multiuser editing and code highlighter) is working now. Hopefully it will be released before beginning of Spring Semester. If I understood his talk properly, Asher's briefcase can also be used for concurrent code editing. Asher also talked about his comment making program. It is a small light weight tool and does cool things. Better yet, this tool has been used at least by one other person!.

Zhixun briefly mentioned one additional feature (of calculation) in his Djinta project. He talked out his other project of users distinguishing between TED http://www.ted.com and Onion (spoof of TED) http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/25/the-onion-eviscerates-social-media-experts_n_2188593.html

Zhixun has created a website with links to two videos and ask users to identify which one is which - Then he said it may be viewed as a classification problem (and use machine learning techniques).. Zhinxun gave a cool demo of his website (uses sqlite and jquery) with a provision of users to provide inputs for links to TED and onion videos.

Bharat and Dimitre gave a presentation of Peirce Logic. They have a come long way. Their system is almost to be used by the cognitive science course (from where the idea for this project came).  They gave a nice demo of the functioning of their system (storing of proofs and retrieving old proofs is in the works). But their undo feature (which they implemented) is very nice.

Gerry gave a presentation of yet another side project of his namely Emulator project. He has implemented a lot more games, cleaned up the code have a working timer. He gave a demo which is very impressive.

There were more side projects presentation than actual projects. That is fine - as long as some useful code gets generated. It will be nice to have progress with original projects also.

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 11 (11/13/2012) Fall 2012

Week 11 (11/13/2012) Fall 2012

Today was total solar eclipse in New Zeland and Australia (happened around 3:30 pm EST) - I was watching it in google hangout - almost missed attending the wonderful meeting of RCOS. Jorel has uploaded almost all the video of  talks in youtube. RCOS channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1  We had  six talks to day.


1) Matt Zanchelli Sonar and  IOSPasscode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ios-passcode/

2) Kyle Keraga and Shoshana Rubinstein CLASS Initiative - Study Groups

3) Asher Glick Rensselaer Phrequencey Identification http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer phrequency-identification/

4) Thomas Chestna Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

5) Prof. Magdon Malik Ismail

6) Damian Mastylo, Austin Gulati, Chris Celi   The Collegiate http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-collegiate/

Matt Z started off with his IOSPasscode and explained some of the details. It is already in the appstore and has been downloaded at least 1000 times and has been getting good reviews. He is currently making his system available in many languages. Matt also demonstrated the working his system. His current project Sonar is for reporting bugs. He has been making a steady progress and he has not integrated with mailer yet.  There were interesting discussions.

Kyle and Shoshana (Student Senators)  presented a project from Student .Senate. They want to develop a system to form study groups. They want to have this system as an opt out system. Their proposed system uses data from rpilms and registrar. My main concern is the privacy issues and administration trusting students developing the system - Of course once the system is developed some one has to maintain it.  Hope the student senate is powerful enough to resolve this. Interesting discussions followed.

Asher presented RFID project. Their system used Processing for GUI . Because of lack of portability, they are moving to PyQt. Asher showed a demo of the working of his system. Right now it works only with a laptop/computer. RFID works like a charm. Hopefully RCOS will be able to use the system for taking attendance :) Stand alone system has some bugs and they are ironing out. Hopefully RFID will be rolled out soon. A lot of questions/suggestions were made by the students. 

Tom presented his Scrtiny system. He has been doing a lot oof back end job. He is trying to parallelize his back end to make it faster. He plans to have a nice gui to highlight the similarity and differences of programs. Tom plans to test out with instructors in programming intensive courses.

Prof. Malik gave an interesting tutorial on Machine learning. He peppered his talk with thought provoking questions and puzzles. He talked very briefly about supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforced learning. He also cautioned about overfitting data. He closed his talk posing  three challenging puzzles.

Damian, Austin and Chris talked about their Android project to help maintain schedules/classes/exams/how to get good grades etc. They have made substantial progress. They also have evenly divided their project among the three of them- It is an impressive achievement for any one - especially for a freshmen group. They plan to release a version by the end of this semester.

All the talks were excellent - as usual I learned a lot from listening to the talks as well insightful questions from other students.

Week 10 (11/6/2012) Fall 2012

Week 10 (11/6/2012) Fall 2012

The Fall semester is speeding along.  RCOS students had participated so many activities this semester (RPI Medalists Day, Admissions Open House, RCOS Hackathon, UPE Open Source Festival, NYState Hackathon, UPE Programming Competition, Entrepreneur of the year poster presentation) - a near burnt out feeling. Projects are coming along. 

This week we had four presentations:

1) Deon Robinson FreakAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

Deon has been progressing along. His project identifies the images and makes a semantic tags. He is working on the back end as of now. He is planning to test with a large number of images.

2) Jorge Jiminez (Guest Speaker) Ithos Global

Jorge works at a company on Government regulation for food suppliers and his company uses Open Source Software. His talk was to inform/educate the students of potential uses of their projects and to recruit bright students for their company.

3) Colin Rice David Vorrick  BitHopper http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

Colin and David briefly talked about their BitHopper project. David is working on the front end and Colin is working on the back end. Their project is coming along.

4) Ian Ooi  Big and CSTools   http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/big/  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cs-tools/

Ian talked about CSTools a helpful interactive guide for students to familiarize with programming, unix tools and other helpful hints. Ian is working on this project by himself. It is a noble project with an intention to help the students. He has made an initial dent in the project. He also talked about his summer project Big (an easy method to reinstall the system). He has completed most of it at least for some versions of linux  That needs a bit more testing and extension to other OS.

It is yet another hectic week and I am barely keeping my head above water!

Week 9 (10/30/2012) Fall 2012

Week 9 (10/30/2012) Fall  2012

The semester has been progressing along. There was a nice write up last week's open source festival in Poly newspaper  This week we had four talks.


1)  Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz RPIDirectory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

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

3) Stephen Silber, James McMillan and Colin Steiffel   RPI Mobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

4) Mike Agnew ReserveMe  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

Christian, Dan and Mike started of their recent updates in rpidirectory. These include suggestions for searches, new API, realtime pie chart and personalization. Please check out http://rpidirectory.appspot.com/ and see how cool it is. Mike has ported to Android with a new UI. Dan has done good backend improvements and Christian has taken care of teh whole project.

Colin presented his slides inside Koala - Colin has been making a lot of progress with a front end. He plans to rewrite his parser so that it is faster and flexible.

Stephen, James and Colin are progressing along RPIMobile. They are planning to release a version before the Spring Semester. Stephen has incorporated the Laundry Status. Stephen has registered RPI Mobile for TestFlight, a free Over-The-Air platform used to distribute beta and internal iOS applications to team members. James is using a server and scraped the athletic data - He is also planning to scrape the menu data and laundry status. Colin is working on making it portable to Android.

Mike talked about ReserveMe a project in reserving city parks and other information available to the community. This is a project is done in conjunction with the city of Schenectady. Mike has made progress with the user interface  http://agnewm.myrpi.org/reserveme/ - He has planned to use innodb and mysql for the backend. 

All in all it was a great afternoon and listened to great talks. Hope others will come forward by themselves (with out me twisting their arms or pulling their teeth :) ) to give talks!