First Three Weeks at RCOS

Spring Semester 2010

Time flies and when you get sick work load drags you down. How do you fly when your body gets dragged down by sickness - That is what happened to me at the beginning of the Spring Semester 2010. Any way I decided to fly with the students who are soaring high! Thanks to Sean O'Sullivan class of 1985 for his generous donation for enabling the students and faculty members to soar high in Open Source Software World.

Week 1: (1/29/2010)

We have a very good group of students interested in doing varied Open Source Projects. Hope their interests sustain through out the semester. We want to hear great accomplishments by the students. Students are still settling down with their projects and finding group partners. Android applications development seem to be a big favorite among students this semester.

For the first week we had two invited guests - Dean Hill from NY State Senate about NY State DotCIO intiatives to make Government proceedings transparent with open source software. His talk slides can be found in

Ny Senate Open Source Initiatives

View more presentations from NY Senate.

The second talk is by Jon Chen on his software development graduate applications review system for the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer.

Gradapp Talk by Jon Chen on 1/29/2010

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Week 2: (2/5/2010)

We had a fine talk by Ms. Duffy class of 2003 on How to Get involved in an Open Source Operating System. Ms. Duffy works at Red Hat and she works on HCI related problem. Her talk slides may be found here. We had a packed audience listening intently. If you do not believe me, please look at the photos her colleague took during her talk here. Ms. Duffy wants to see a number of RPI students apply for internship position at Fedora/RedHat. The internship description may be found here.

Week 3: (2/12/2010)

We have a group of seniors who volunteered to mentor the studens on the need basis. These fine group of students (Rob, Josh, Eric, Devin, Ben, Tim to name a few ) not only produce good code/software, maintain some of the infrastructure (both hardware and software) also help out mentoring. Thanks guys. This week we have talks by the following four students (and their respective groups)

1. Rob Escriva
2. Eric Allen
3. Allen Lavoie
4. Zach and his group.

Zach's group consists of sophomore students and they are implementing a grade tracking (grade tracking is a popular hobby for students at RPI - The folklore is that the students have developed optimization algorithms in computing how much effort is needed to get the grade he/she wants!) for Andorid. We are hoping such a software will benefit the students, tip the faculty members to be more vigilant about slackers (Benefit to the faculty members come only because the software is open source!)



There has been a variety of good news -

1) Yongqian Li , (as a first semester Freshmen) a Fall 2008 project participant of RCOS, created a Firefox extension called FastestFox
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825). It
is quite popular, with several million users. It has also been covered
in the media, with reviews on CNet, Lifehacker, and other, smaller,
blogs. It is also profitable, mostly from ads, to Li (who is in the Bay area
on leave from RPI)

Press coverage:

• cnet
• Life Hacker

Congratulation to Li (whose 2008 Fall project was about mining wikipedia

2) Computer Science Department is trying to provide laboratory space for RCOS students. Every one is working hard to make this a reality soon.

Links:

1. RCOS website
2. Blog Aggregator
3. Dashboard (Hot off the Press: we have 76% coverage of Spring Projects)