Week 7 (3/13/2015) Spring Semester 2015

The weeks are flying, I was feeling overwhelmed last week and hence did not write a blog.
Tuesday amlla group meeting with mentors seems to be ging well.

On Friday (3.13.2015) we had our usual meetings with the following speakers.

1)Rob Russo, Vijay Nambiar, Josh Baik, Ylonka Machado, Peter Ko -
Lapsus http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lapsus-linguae/

2)Joshua Makinen, Jim Boulter, Christina Hammer, Dennis Fogerty -
MeNext http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/

3)Branden Clark - DynamoRIO http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

Lapsus is a speech feedback to make better presentations.  They are using google speech API to analyze the speech and parse - give feedback to the user to impove ones public speaking ability. They even showed a small demo -  They have a web front end. They have a plan to complete this before the end of the semester.

MeNext has come a long way. Joshua is refactoring the backend. Jim is working on the IPhoen, Dennis is working on Android, and Christina is working on Windows Phone and Theo on the UI. They seem to be well onto theor way in making MeNext usable. Already it is on the AppSotr.

Breden talked about DynamoRio. He and his partners are making steady progress,. Bendan showed a nice demo of using DynamoRio for side attack.

I think we may have onlySeventy percent attendance - the course loads are picking up. Nevertheless who so ever came seem to be intrested in learning and asking intelligent questions and sharing their knowledge.

Week 5 (2/23/2015) Spring Semester

31 of 43 projects have been updated

26 of 43 repositories have been updated

16 of 43 blogs have been updated

I am just pasting the 5th week Observatory dashboard just to be proud of the students' accomplishments and hard work.

This week we had three talks.
1) Josh Goldberg - ASP.NET MVC
2) Brian Kelley, John Behnke, Zach Minster - Where R U? - Designing a
Cross Platform App

3) Aaron Gunderson and Nick Pitt - Basic Django

Josh talked about C # and asp.net and how the model view controller works. He gave  His homeworker as a demo using his methodology and technology stack. There were interesting questions and he answered them quite well.

Brian, John and Zach talked about building apps for IPhone and Andrioid. They emphasized the Dos and Donts in app building (mostly to conform with the standrads of respective platform and use of the libraries).

Aaron and NIck presented Django as a Model View Controller using Django. They had an application built using Djanago and helped explain the concept with that example.

All in all excellent talks. I wish I am faster to understand and experiment with their site/code. (That is my problem! :( )

Week 4 (2/16/2015) Spring Semester

We are already on the fourth week into the Spring Semester.

We did not have small group meeting this Tuesday as RPI has a mini winter break (Monday was Presidents day).

On Friday we had three speakers

:1) Colin Rice '14 - Internet Harder - AutoRoute
2) Rob Rouhani and Aaron Gunderson- Unit Tests
3) John Drogo- Mean Stack

Here is a twitter photo of Colin Rice giving the talk https://twitter.com/rcosrpi/status/568886071997702145/photo/1

Eric and Dimitar are working with Colin on this project http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoroute/  Idea behind this project is make the routing scheme finer and have some kind of cost mechanism (for packets) to make it to work is Blom filter (to stoe the BGP table efficienty).

Rob and Aaron gave a fantastic talk with continuous integration and unit test. I did not know till that talk that there is a utility you can integrate with Github (Travis-CI)  He has posted his slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1yxSFWgp-u1vtA1ZEIXBQ62zEIhTgUBnJj3wyvM5onTg/edit?usp=sharing They also gave a live demo where unit tests failed and he modified the code to fix it. To effectively use continuous integration, one has to write unit tests.
https://github.com/rcos/VendingMachine

John Drago talked about MEAN stack (for web development) (mongo, express, Angular, nodejs) and how it is much better than LAMP Stack (linux,Apache, MySQL and PHP). He brought out the good aspects of nodejs (javascript intepreter meshes with Python) an dhow nonSQL database like MOngoDB one can have a dynamic database.  He showed a live graph demo with web crawers and it was quite impressive. I wanted to learn what he did (as it is something similar to what John Punin and I did a long time ago). I am waiting for his post.

All in all I learnt a lot from these meetings. Highlight of the meeting seems to be free google swags that they distributed at the beginning of the meeting.

Week 3 (2/13/2015) Spring Semester 2015

We have a snowy winter this semester. Irrespective of that, RCOS is going on strong. The mentors are meeting with individual groups on Tuesday. Hopefully the projects wil get closer attention and hence a greater output.

On Friday, we had three presentations:

1) Jesse Frietas- Designing Software Around Your Audience
2) Moorthy - Suggestions for making you and RCOS famous
3) Forest Crossman - Open Source Licenses

Jesse taked about the customers for whom the software is designed - How one should be willing to broaden the customer base. He also shared his expereince with his homework serever project.

I talked about the concerns the department and the recruiters have. I cajoed them to work hard and learn as many new things as possible. With the new mentorship, I do hope that the students will be given a close attention.

FOrest talked about the different OSI licenses. He mentioned the advantages and the disadvantages of each of the licenses. Hope he posts his slides soon.

Lead mentors (Aaron, Seve and Roibert) suggested a homework on git where in they have to add a project and the members in that project. Most of the students seem to have done - https://github.com/rcos/rcos-projects/tree/master/projects

Week 2 Spring 2015 (Week of 2nd February 2015)

RCOS meeting Friday 6th Feb 2015

Above is a photo taken on 2/6/2015 (Friday). We have around 158 students - The big problem of collecting all the URP forms and the project proposals was ably managed by David Goldschmidt. The mentors are chosen.

Mentors for Spring 2015

On Tuesday (2/3/2015) we had a few remaining project pitch presentations. David G gave a tutorial on how to fill the various forms and how to submit them. Then instructions were given how to get into slack (our chat forum - http://rcos.slack.com ), Observatory (http://rcos.rpi.edu ) , google groups  (https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/rcos-at-rensselaer ) and git set up. The paper work at RPI is sapping my energy!

On Friday (2/6/2015), we had one more project pitch presentation  (hopefully name of that project will change - D'oh - didn't know that meaning - till Rob told me the meaning - shame on me being a pseudo cruciverbalist :( ) . Theo and Josh gave a brief talk on Git and showed its power. They posted their slides to the group. Here is it Sevi and his partner gave a talk on socket.io (javascript socket - with node.js) and showed off their network game. RCOS students participated with gusto.

The mentors/projects list may be found here 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1myM_ju6PCRiy9pJZQosFju6cktbmjlH-jYNw7mirUpE/edit?usp=sharing

I am looking forward to the spring semester - with some trepidation.

Week 1 - Spring 2015 (Week of 26th January 2015)

First Meeting

Spring Semester has started with a bang on Tuesday 27th of January. We are meeting in DCC 318. As the above photo indicates the room was full of eager and talented students itching to develop open source code. Sophia, Robert and Sevi welcomed the group. I (Moorthy) gave the history of RCOS and Dave G talked about the forms and procedure. Robert  gave insurctions for the pitch day presentation. We had two technical talks one by Sevi and one by Jorel. Sevi taked about his work wih Sia during the winter break. Jorel talked about his company and how i is doing custom hardware design (and how it started from RCOS). By the way he was the only person who git a standing ovation from the audience.

Second Meeting on 1/30/2105

We had our second meeting (Friday 30th January). As the above photo indicaes, the interest is still high. We started off the meeting with a presentation by Graham Ramsey and Damian Matsylo on Grapefruit. They have made substantial contribution. A few professors are testing ou their software in class (Summer 2014 (Bridge Calculus Course by Piper) Fall 2014 and Spring 2015). They are carefully introducing features. They will be making a presentation the SIGCSE 2015 conference in Kansas during March 2015 (much thanks to REDHAT for sponsoing their trip).  Sophia and Theo talked about the help sessions they are organizing for new students. Their talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12sPVgxnMFOGJtcSeq8UUdz5hupKVN7SwS-IiEH44lwM/edit . They detailed what is a project  This was followed by project pitch presentation (one minute talk) by students. (Most of the students had originaly circulated their projects to RCOS mailing list and got feedback). The order of their presentation is here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1NYX73rnYoSP7gHIavLL4r6p0Q9a0NpXODfF9hk950mU/edit#gid=0  and the actual pitch slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/12Y-Ea_Ly4BejZSc5AKJ-zqgxUghmkhOLeCYs8np7Fos/edit#slide=id.g6db50ce5b_030  Pitch slides were very nice and the pitch presentations were very good.

Talks are in our youtube Channel https://www.youtube.com/user/rcosrpi1 (Thanks to Gabe for recording and posting).

I do hope that the interests continue through out the semester and the students produce oustanding and useful open source software. 

Week 15 (12/2/2014) Fall Semester 2014

This is the last meeting of our Fall Semester 2014. We did not make the same mistake like last semesters (ut may have committed new ones :( ) I am satisfied with overall proceedings of the semester. But it did require a lot of efforts from various people. I should thank the lead mentors and all the mentors and Dr. Goldschmidt for thei part in making this semester a success.

The following groups made presentations:

1) Jake Lowey- SpokenMedia  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spokenmedia/
(mentor Aaron Gunderson)
2) Jonathan Wrona, Dan Lowe - DnD5e Toolbox
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ibeis/ (mentor Zach Jablons)
3) Amartya Chakraborty,Shinya Hirata,Sam Yuan,Sensen Chen,Aaron Cheng
- rClubs.me - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-tradebook/ (mentor
Jorel Lalicki)
4) Kevin Fung, Darren Lin, Garrett Chang - Emissary
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/emissary/ (mentor Kevin Fung)
5) Arya Seghatoleslami,Tom Yang and Jeemiah Hendrix  - YumYum! -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/yumyum1/ (mentor Alex Freska)
6)Chenrui Cao, Xi Xi, Renjie Xie, Juntao Zhuang - 2W When and Where
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas Pitt)
7) Emmett Hitz and Paul Revere - Vest -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/vest/ (mentor Theo Browne)
8)Eric Oswald, Jorel Lalicki - Adaptable Automotive sensor
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/adaptable-automotive-sensor-logger/
(mentor Aaron Gunderson)

Spokenmedia was a new project (changed from 3D HCI) mid way through the semester. Thius project uses Dragon software and Microsoft's C++ (or is it C sharp). He could not show the demo - He is making a steady progress.

DnD5 is anew project (started after RPIHack) for playing dungeons and dragons. The have done some preliminary implementation. They plan to get the data (manual for the game) fromc crowd -sourcing. They also making sure that no violation against copy-rights. 

rClubs.me have progressed reasonaly well. They showed a demo. Main concern is the data for various clubs. Union is also starting  a new wbsite. As one poster mentioned it may worth joining efforts. rClus  also seem to include social aspects - I do not know the effect of this.

Emissary is a javascript (from python) program to watch the league of legends. They have made very good progress and they showed a demo.

YumYum project has come a long way. They included information aout downtown restaurants. They have uilt the system using Ruby on Rails.

When and Where is a websevice (written in PHP) for knowing uilding openings and facilities available in that uilding. They also showed a demo of their project.

Vest is a project to find potential victims from past crime data (based on a paper by a Yale Sociologist). They have scrapped faceook to get the friend of crime victims. Their next job is to verify aout the hypothesis.

Automative log sensor project is nearing its completion. Most of the programs and the circuit designs have been done. Remains to be incorporated in the automobile.

Finally a new project to install free ooms in a library notifier was proposed. This project was done in conjunction with RPI librray (has the blessings of Mr. Mayo).

Very nice talks and very interesting questions. I provided ice cream cake for all their efforts to show my token of appreciation.