Week 11 (7/29/2014) Summer 2014

Week 11 (7/29/2014) Summer 2014

This is the penultimate week of the Summer session. So we had a large number of talks. Unfortunately we did not record the videos as Gabe is out of town for a well earned rest and a visit with his family. A photo taken during last weeks hackathon

1) Kit Hammer & Noelle Todd - Client DB http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-pantry-client-database/ (mentor Theo) - 2nd Talk - Great

2) Kevin Sullivan Rise https://github.com/Sidetalker/Rise

3) Maia Marchetti - Milkyway@home Expansion http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome-server-expansion/ (mentor Robert) - 2nd Talk - Great

4) Bobby Parker,Zach Vanderzee and David Koloski- Unity-Open 2D http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/unity-open-2d-toolkit/ (mentor Robert) - 2nd Talk - Great

5)  Peter Kang and Kevin Andrade - AskRPI - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/askrpi/ (mentor Connor) - 2nd Talk - Great

6) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang, Aman Zargapur -  Pokemon RPI - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (Mentor Jim) - 2nd Talk Great

7) Jake Weiss and Roland Judd -  Milkyway@Home - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome/  (Mentor Ji Woong) -2nd Talk Great

8) Jake Lowey and Jonathan Bergman - 3D HCI -  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/3d-hci/ (mentor Jorel) - 2nd Talk Great 

9)  Ravi Panse and Henry Choi - RPHub - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rphub/ (mentor Andy) -2nd Talk Great

10) Michael weldon, Victor Iwasko and Orin Amsden - TextLock - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/textlock/ (mentor Soraya) - 1st Talk

11) Eric Zhang - GitMusic/Cantabile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cantabile/ (mentor ?) - 1st Talk

Kit nad Noelle have made a prototype and showed it to the food pantry people(one computer science and one nontechnical). They liked it. They requested feature requests. They hope to have the system done by the end of Fall Semester.

Kevin Sullivan talked about his IPhone application for elevation computation (using GPS and google map api). He is also developing nice 2 D graphics application.His goal is to release the app and then work on 3D maps.

Maia talked about her .new Milkyway@home server. She has done the server side implementation an has tested. She has to port her server.

Bobby , Zach and David have done a marvelous job with unity 2d (now called Pb or Lead) - They have their code forked and they have accomplished everything they set forth. It is indeed the most successful project this summer.

Peter and Kevin have implemented their AskRPi - a mixture of reddit and twitter with a direct email to professor for answers to specific questions. They need a bit more work before they can release their software.

Theodore, Tammy and Aman have made progress with their PokemanRPI. All their background code is done. They now have to customie for the story. They plan to do it during the rest of the summer.

Jake and Roland talked about their use of CMake in making all their code for different machines and their new dashboard. Jake talked about testing their code (of background separation) by creating a model which generates data - this data could be used for testing their code. He also plans to write the code in C, C++ from python to speedup.

Jake and Jonathan talked about their 3D HCI and their progress. They could not show ther demo because of their arduino broke/fired. They have their finger/keyboard gestures working, but not their mouse gestures. They attributed to the problem in accelerometer data. I requested them to post a youtube video of their keyboard gestures working.

Ravi talked about RPIHub - a repository of research projects woth tags. They have a prototype website working. They plan to release it to  RPI community during the fall semester.

Michael,, Victor and Orin talked about their crypted text essaging systems. They showed a demo of their system using androids. The message gets encrypted as it is sent and when it is received by the client, the message gets decrypted. There were a lot of suggestions from students how to improve their system.

Eric Talked about his project gitmusic which is a music collobration system. The git part is till not working. He has a rudimentary editor and he has a rudimentary audio playing system. This project needs more work (partly as he changed his project and there are no mentors). Again the students asked a lot of questions and suggestions.

Again I learnt a lot from attending these talks.

Week 4 Summer 2014 (6/10/2014)

Weeks are passing by under a cool/warm summer breeze. Students are working hard. The blogs are getting posted and the codes are getting updated - All of them are good signs. Hope this trend continues.

This week we had four talks.
1)  Jonathan Bergman, Jake Lowey, and Erik Vink-Lainas - 3D HCI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/3d-hci/
2)  Alex white - Why functional programming?
3) Jorel Lalicki - Hackodex http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/hackodex/
4) Daniel Baek and Sunil Kumar - OpenIRT http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openirt/  and Sodexo Menu Parser - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/



Jonathan, Jake and Erik talked about a 3D HCI meant for Lazy people to watch and change channels in TV and veg out - ideal for many/most people in the world! They are using ardunio and handgoves to get sensor input and have the desired effect. They have a very basic program running. They have ardunio and they are using golf gloves for sensors. Looks like a very nice project with lots of potentials for use (including for handicapped people) Robert Rouhani made some helpful suggestions.

Alex talked about Functional Programming - its advantages and feature. Alex did not like much os Apple's  swife http://guardianlv.com/2014/06/apple-releases-new-programming-language-swift/  He gave other pure functional language, how they are thread safe, programs are succinct. Alex based on his talk stemming from his OCaml implementation for Natural languae parsing for his project. There were a number of interesting questions.

Jorel talked about Hackodex which provides project starters and head hunters about the capabilities of various persons and projects using a simple search. What I liked about his presentation was the number of releases (each incorporating some features). He is doing in Python and Django. For the first release, he is planning to use GitHub API. Then the will create a data base for the next release. The third release will have complex queries (those fields are not present in the API )

Daniel and Sunil talked about their joint  project on OpenIRT - Creating libraries for Infra Red sensors This will be on going project into next semester. By the end of this semester, they hope to have some open source libraries for IR sensors. They have the hardware ready.Moorthy suggested looking at this project (RFID) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/ and Jorel also had suggestions. Daniel is also working on Sodexco Menu Scrapper. he is cleaning up the code to be used in RPIMobile project. Daniel seems to be very enthusiastic and prompt. I hope some good things come out of this project.

As usual I am impressed with  very nice presentations and students' participations. The talks are uploaded in RCOS youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1 (The last talk seems to be not loaded)   My major complaint is the students have not posted their presentation slides to every one nor posted them in their blog (I have to keep repeating/nagging like a nasty person :( )