Week 11 (11/4/2014 and 11/7/2014) Fall Semester 2014

We are in eleventh week in he Fall semester and the projects are picking up momentum. We already have had students giving their second talk.

on Tuesday we had the following presentations

1) Huiye, Xitu, Xinchi, Wei, Joseph, Yiding, Peiyan - ShengGuanTu
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/

2)  Severin Ibarluzea and Joey Lee - Socket.io

3)  Keenan Sanchez, Hayley Schluter - FireDB
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/firedb1/

4)  Aesa Kamar - Functional Programming

ShenGuanTu game project is going well. They have posted their talk slides:https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1D4aFm8oQdirPeOCee7THyRY8QHeBgPp8O1usXpkmO-c/edit?usp=sharing  They were unable to show a demo - They did a youtube video of their project.

Sevi and Joey gave a project presentation of socket.io which uses javascript - They showed how the client server works. They showed a traditional chat room - Then they showed off their distributed game and the students participaed with gusto. It was a very nice talk. Their slides will be found here http://slides.com/severinibarluzea/deck--4#/ and their repo is https://github.com/seveibar/networked-color-game

kennen and Hayley talked about their project on Webenable local database for ems services. They are building a system to streamline the recertification process. They have done a fair amount of work and they are progressing along well.

Asea gave a very nice presentation Functional programming (I have to miss as I have to be at Freshmen advising) I did read his slides thugh. Of course there is an advantage of no states - makingmultithread programming a lot easier.

on Friday we have the following talks:
1)Devon Bernard - OMail
2)Chris May, Paul Chiappetta and Brian O'Sullivan - DGAL
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dgal1/ (mentor Austin Gulati)
3) Kevin Fung, Chris Brenon - Chlorine
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chlorine-opencl/ (mentor Colin Rice) -
2nd Talk
4)Theo Browne -  Docktor -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/docktor-for-osx/ (mentor Jim Boulter) -
2nd Talk
5) Jonathan Wrona and Dan Lowe - IBEIS -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ibeis/ (mentor Zachary Jablons)

Devon gave his hackathon project omail - an outlook extension to sease in searching the attachment types andother tags This comes close to semantic searching the emails.

Chris and  Paul talked about DGAL - a genetic algorithms library. They gave a demo - a nice optimization package - very impressive for the amount of understanding required. Their talk slides may be found https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZlgZhIJ-COmuAYQhRkkgZYVACvuH8vKORP9OypNehzE/edit#slide=id.p

Kevin and Chris gave their second presentation of Chlorine - a library to make GPU programming much asier. Last time they showed a fractal demo. This time they could not show their ray tracing demo
They plan to receive their software at the end of the semester/

Theo gave his second talk on Doktor - docking system with a new improved Logo. He gave a nice demo. His software is almost ready. He isplanning to ship out his software by the end of the semester.

Jonathan and Dana talked about their project on IBEIS - an image processing siftware to identifying wild animals for preservation. They are developing an easier interface so that the core of the software could e used by field workers. Their talk slides may be found here http://slides.com/jonathanwrona/ibeis#/
  

Week 6 (9/23/2014) and (9/26/2014) Fall Semester

We had two meetings this week - on Tuesday and on Friday. Despite the students being busy with their first exams and career fair, we had a good round of talks and a good set of presentations.

On Tuesday (9/23/2014) we had three talks

1) Dave Vorick - Start up Expereince

2) Huiye, Xitu, Xinchi, Wei, Yiding, Peiyang - ShengGuanTuhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/andhttp://shengguantu.weebly.com/blog
3) Jake Lowey - IntUI-Scrape - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/intui-scrape/

On Friday (9/26/2014) we had five talks

1)Browne - Docktor (For OS X)  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/docktor-for-osx/

2) Dennis Fogerty, Austin Gulati - Whats that Sample -http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/whats-that-sample/  (self mentored!?)
3) Kevin Fung, Chris Brenon - Chlorine  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chlorine-opencl/ 
4) Sensen, Aaron, Sam, Amartrya, Shinya - RPI Clubs and Activiteshttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-tradebook/

5) Jorel Lalicki    URL redirection/enhancing http://yolome.me


Dave Vorick '14 gave an interesting talk based on his expereinces of building his startup - the ups and downs. He also talked about the technical issues (currency for distributed strogae). He talked both about theory (Byzantine protocols and cryptology) as well as the software aspects of them. His talk was very well received by the students after many interesting question/answer exchanges .

Jack Lowey talked about having a GUI to scrape information from websites. His aim is to scrape reddit, car sales and targeted sites.  He is making a steady progress (He is using python to scrape sites). The students advise not to scrape sites with no crawl in robots.txt. 

Huiye, Xitu, Xinchi, Wei, Yiding, Peiyang talked  about ShenGuanTu. The team has increased from last summer. But they have broken their group into people doing subtasks. Each of the group members talked about their contribution. Their talk looked impressive. They sowed a youtue version of their game steps. They are advised to integrate the different groups contibution into the main game earlier otherwise it may be difficult to do that later on.

On Friday, we had five talks.
Theo started giving the current status of his Docktor project for Macs. He has completed many aspects of that project.  He also plans to release a version for IPad. He is als planning to make it work under apples newest operating system.

Dennis and Austin arr working an android app to recignize the music that is being played and provide further information. It amounts to samling the music and comparing with a dictionary of music.  They have started and have a mock up diagram for their app.

Kevin and Chris talked about their near complete Chlorine system. It is an easy to prototype parallel programs using their system for graphics processors. It is written in opencl. They showed how to create parallel programs on the fly. They also demoed with writng a fractal program ad showed the speed up. It was awesome. This system is already used in Naval Ressearch Center (where Kevin worked as an intern).

Sensen, Aaron, Sam, Amartrya, Shinya talked about a website for clubs and activities. Their presentation detailed what the group was doing each week. (I really liked seeing them - It gives me a clear picture of their efforts). They have a website dedicated to their project. Their login system is almost working. Next task is to get the meeting times and events They also want to incorporate social aspect to their system (There was a pertinent question why some one would prefer this to a facebook group - They had an answer and I could not hear their answer properly - my only rationale it is a stand alone works even without a facebook account). There are a couple of useful suggestions about using other existing libraries to make their task easier.

Jorel gave a fascinating talk about URL enhancer/redirector. Unlike url shortneer, it enhances it (makes it bigger!). He has implemented using PHP. He gave a cool demo of this system http://yolome.me/ 

His presentation can be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ctsgSidJ27Czp47X42wHLLW0vNGzuePAmzv53QA-DyU/edit#slide=id.p and his repo can be found https://github.com/jorellalicki/yolomemegeneratorplugin . People interested in contributing to this project may contact hashtag@yolome.me 

Google groups https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rcos-at-rensselaer/s-7kT7C_Y3Q

On the whole, it was a very good week - I thoroughly enjoyed all the presentations. I also get to meet some of our distinguished alumni who dropped on our Friday meeting.