week 12 (11/11/2014 and 11/14/2014) Fall Semester

RCOS group is going strong. We are all busy with courses, projects, grading and Hackathon. It is good to be busy doing something than being idle!

On Tuesday we had the following talks

1) Charlie Machalow - cDashboard -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)
2) Jim Boulter, Josh Makinen, Justin Etzine- MeNext -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/ (mentor Jorel Lalicki)
3) Aaron Gunderson, Burke Livingston , Joseph Lee, John Yannou, Amy
Zhang, Parker Haynes, Nathan Bernard - Whiteboard-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/4xb/ (mentor Eric Oswald)
4) Laurie Wu - Travel/Interests Site (mentor
DevonBernard)
5) Sophia D'Antoine, Brandon Clark -Security Course/Web

cDashBoard has many new features added including Battery life remaining, cMOte )(media controller), spotify integration, cRemainder, cReviewer and cNotifier - He also designed the system according to software enginering principles- Got new feature requests. It looks like cDashboard works under windows 10 too. The demo went very well - impressive software.

MeNext was demoed with webinput. It was very nice - ith students voting for the song. Jim said about his update being gone and he plans to work the iPhone thing work. Because of the sound system, they could not test their software in RPIHack. But their project is very ncie - nearly completed.

Whiteboard also showed offt their system (running under AWS). Their website is in  http://uniwhiteboard.com/ Please test it and provide a feedback http://goo.gl/Xa1F3K  Their talk slides are found in
http://slides.com/aarongunderson/whiteboard-nov-11#/

Laurie is stating a new project Spontaneous Travel Agent.  - providing safety zones, walkable places, restaurnts using social networks. The project is still in its infancy. Hopefully it will take on.

Sophia and Brendon talked about the new security course that was being offered. They showed the binary exploits. Their talk slides (very interesting three programs) canbe found here http://rcos.rpi.edu/project/dr-memory/post/presentation111114/
and https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jv7CZ4S29HG6QrgVmjXYZnOI5z_3VDr5GddekSz2FQU/edit

On Friday (11/14/2014) we had four talks.
1) Devon Bernard - Chrome Extensions & BrowserDB
2) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/
(mentor Aaron Gunderson)
3) Severin Ibarluzea, Kiana McNellis and Aaron Gunderson: New Attendence System

Devon gave a cool presentation of Chrome Extension for bookmark, nots and search management. BroswerDB is available in Chromestore https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browserdb/bfobgfmimpgejgkoloppcoojoleolbll

Open Lab project is going on well. Because of the difficulty with Aurdino, this project is using cypress and proprietary sofwtare. It enhances openLab features. 

The new attendence system seems to be working well (People text a code to a specified telephone number) and the results are stored in google form. The codes chane every meeting. Their talk slides may be found here http://slides.com/severinibarluzea/deck--5#/

Most of the students are getting ready for RPIHack. As we speak that hackathon is coming to an end now. The organizers worked very hard on that.  You can hear the local news coverage here http://albany.twcnews.com/content/news/785858/students-from-60-colleges-participate-in-hackrpi-event/

Week 4 ( Week of 15th September) Fall Semester 2014

We had a group photo taken on Tuesday a well as the photo of the mentors (see at the bottom of thi blog). As you can see from the photo, the group has grown by leaps and bounds.  Alo Jorel made sure that all the students had mentors and all the projects appear on the dashboard. Robert made sure that the remaining projects with no mentors have been taken care. The attendence during Tuesday wasrather strong (most students showed) - however the attendence during the Friday session was rather sparse (I do not know why).

On Tueday (9/16/2014) we had two talks:

1) Aaron Gunderson- Whiteboard  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/4xb/

2) Jim Boulter, Josh Makinen, and  Justin Etzine MeNext  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/

On  Friday (9/19/2014) we had two more talks

1) Paul Revere, Emmett Hitz - Vest http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/vest/

2) Gabe Perez (WebTech) - WebTech Projects and Flagship

The white board group has become a group of six. So they have split the work . Some are working on the back end, some are working on the mobile version and some are working on cheduling and the front end. Aaron alo showed a demo of his project/. This project looks quite promising. Their presentation elicited a lot of questions and suggestions.

Jim, Josh and Jutine talked about their project MeNext - video/song selection . They have implemented IPhone version and a web version (Android version is also on the works). They demoed a version of their system. MeNext is also a promiing project (they have scheduled to release it during November Hackathon at RPI). Their presentation also aroused a number of questions and suggestions.

On Friday we have two presentations. 

Paul presnted his project on Vest (emmett was absent). They are planning to scrape friends of victins. They are testug the hypothesis that friends of victims are more probable victims (froma theory proposed by an Yale Psychologist). They are planing to construct a database and then construct a graph.  They are planning to use Python and C++/ They are not planning to use Django as it is not a web-based systm.

Gabe talked about his project of Flagship project (and the changing of Concerto version 1 to Concerto version 2) -- Both of them are based on Ruby on Rails. He also talked about other WebTech Projects, myrpi, shuttle trackeer concerto and Rules and Elections website. Gabe gave a demo of all the systems. It was a very fine presentation..

All in all it was a week well worth spent listening to these talks and learning from them. Her e is a group photo of the mentors.

Week 12 - Last Week (8/5/2014) and (8/7/2014) of Summer 2014

Week 12 - Last Week of Summer 2014

We had a cake to culminate the end of summer session 2014.  We committed many mistakes and we did learn from our mistakes - Hopefully we will not commit the same mistakes again. 

The following groups made presentations.

Tuesday (8/5/2014) (Attendance has been dropping like a ton of bricks)

1)   Qinglong Kong, Nanyu Zeng, Yang Wang, Tianbo Xie - Window Cleaning Robot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/clear-glass-project/ (mentor Jorel) - 2nd Talk

2) Daniel Baek and Nikil Sunilkumar - OpenIRT http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openirt/ and Sodexo Menu Parserhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/  (Mento Daniel) -2nd Talk

3)  Brian Corbin, David Claxton - Brewed  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/brewed/ (ind. project) - Brian's first talk

4)  Adam Susser - Dark Matter Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dark-matter-simulation/ (Mentor Nicholas)

5) - Jim Boulter, Emmett Hitz, & Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi - MeNext  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/ (Mentor Jim) - 2nd Talk

6)  Courtney Lang, Brandon McLear, Kirk Smith - Kitchen Assistant http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kitchen-assistant/ (Mentor Aaron) - 2nd Talk

7)  Andy Kakkaramadam, Stephen Romano - RoomScheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/roomscheduler/ (Mentor Andy) -2nd Talk

8) Huiye Liu, Xitu Chen, Eunkyoung Lee, Peiyang Ding, Yiding Zhang - ShengGuanTu http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/  http://shengguantu.weebly.com/ (Mentor Robert)

9) Matt Fenlon and Yeoni Lee - ILS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ils/ (mentor Soraya) - First Talk

10) Avi Weinstein - Asteroids implemented in Scheme/openGL (ind project)

Thursday 8/7/2014 (8 students attended our extra session meeting!)

11)  Avi Weinstock, Alex White, Hayleigh Sanders - Markov-grammatical-inferencer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mgi/ (mentor Joe) - 2nd Talk

12) Jorel Lalicki - Hacodex and others (NATPunch) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/hackodex/ (mentoe Nicholas) - 3rd Talk

13) Zexin Wan - open source card game cetner http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/ (mentor Jee Woong) - First Talk

14) Terrence Farrel - SpritzReader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spritzreader/ (mentor Connor) (by slides and youtube)

Despite my misgivings and misperceptions, most of the students did a creditable project. Wish they had worked harder and completed their projects (or complete their projects before the end of summer) - easier said than done (of course)

What follows is my understanding

Window Cleaning Robot team is in the 3d printing phase of their project.

OpenIRT is still in the design phase. Sodexo Menu parser has difficulty with the day of the menu parsing and spelling errors.

Open Brewary has a preliminary implementation - still some way to go - They are doing their project in IPhone.

Dark matter Simulation found that dynamic fraction may not be the cause of moncerous (/) ring.

MeNext has at least two to three weeks work left to get the two ends talking and to beta test their project.

Room Scheduler hasa lot of data to load and to hand convert into a SVG,

ShengGuanTu has at least three weeks left to get a skeleton of their game working.

Interactive Liquor System had an arduino breakdown. They abandoned their initial implementation in Python - They will be doing it in C or C++ . There was a lvely discussion about adding new features and usefulness of this system.

Asteroid simulation (an independent project) was talked by Avi. he used Scheme and JOGL to implement his system.

Zexin talked about his opensource card framedwork. It still needs considerable work to release an alpha version (written in Java)

Avi, Hayleigh talked MGI (puprose was to learn the programming language OCaml)- Avi did some parser for Natural language like grammar (markov grammar) and display parse tree. He also used Markov Grammar to  generate sentences (depending up on the Markov-ness the sentences made sense or not0. He then showed how to parse those sentences. Hayleigh talked about Qlearning Algorithm to predict the states. Since she could not use Natural Language models, she experimented with Prisoner's dilemna and showed results.

Jorel talked about his projec NatPunch which will facilitate peer to peer gaming without the need of a server. he explained  the theory and his methodology.. He implemented using PHP. His presentation elicited a number of questions from the aprse (but attentive) audience. He then talked about Hacodex. He tried to implement using Django and he  was not satisfied with it (He dislikes programming in Python) and Django may be an overkill for Hacodex.

Terrence sent me slides for SpritzReader as this will be his first talk (and he could not be at RPI because of medical appointments). He had a video of his  demo https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2uVnShx62s_ME9DcjNFSlg2c00/edit?usp=sharing_eil As per his email, " I'm not ready to publish the app yet as I feel it isn't complete, but hope to continue working on it this fall semester, hopefully with a couple of friends."

I was a bbit disappointed mostly with myself - my inability to motivate the students to accomplish what the projects promised. May be I am running out of steam or I am out of touch with reality! Any way a sad state for me to be in :(

Week 8 (7/8/2014) Summer 2014

Week 8 (7/8/2014) Summer 2014

With mid point of the summer gone (July 4th in my view is the middle of summer), students are perking up and trying to finish their projects. We had seven presentations this week.

1) Theo Browne - Docktor (For OSX) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/docktor-for-osx/ 
(mentor Theo Browne)

2)  Adam Susser - Dark Matter Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dark-matter-simulation/ (Problem with Observatory Page- dues to lack of mentor?)

3)  Jim Boulter, Emmett Hitz, and Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi - MeNext 
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/(mentor Kevin O'Connor)

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

5) Connor Ameres -Scrum http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrum/  (mentor Connor Amers)

6)  Robert Rouhani, Samuel Yuan, Renjie Xie, Ryan Lin, Dashiell Kieler - SharpNav http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sharpnav/ (mentor Kevin Fung)

7) Jason Woods, Vatsal Bhagwani, Solomon Mori, Ian Gross - Andriate 
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/andirate/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)

Theo gave a very nice presentation on his docking system for OSX. His system provides different applications for different configurations (these configurations and applications can be customized)He is implementing in Objective C.  He also gave a cool demo. He veen posted is presentation here http://theobrowne.com/Docktor/Presentation1.pdf

Adam gave a talk about Dark Matter Simulation - He is trying to study caustic rings and trying to simulate the hetrogeneous  of n-body problem. He is programming in C. He utliizes both Nemo and Milkyway@home as implementation platforms. He has done some impressive reading of the technical papers. He is currently modeling the macro behavior of hetrogeneous particles. He showed using a video his preliminary results. Adma's project github page is here https://github.com/sussea/NEMO_caustics .

Jim, Emmet and Wyler talked about MeNext -  a democartic client-serer system to view/hear multimedia information. The clients could be in mobile platforms. The clients can add and delete videos and vote on audio/videos. The server (a desktop platform) then selects to play a video/audio that was most popular.

They also (almost) showed a demo on the mobile platform(IPhone). They did demo the server side.

Bobby, Zach and David talked their 2 D extension of Unity. They have posted their talk slides https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Q8zi8MjyghZsI27VZoBKuOIZkC5ygREw4bo0CB3iudw/edit#slide=id.p  I was truly impressed with their progress. Their demo was awesome. Their system (open source and free) ahould be welcme to the unity tool community (for games)

Connor talked about his new system (a scrum ) for developers to keep track of the tasks in the software development cycle. Having participated in scrum last year, I thoink it will be a valuable to have a webtool. Connor showed a short demo of his system.

Robert, Samuel, Ryan and Dashiel talked about their SharpNav system . As per his presentation (thanks for posting the slide), SharpNav is a library with an editor, all written in C# with the following features.

1. It generates navigation meshes
2. It finds paths through navigation meshes
3. It coordinates crowds navigating a mesh
4. It integrates well with a lot of game engines

They showed a very nice demo. Their talk slides may be found here. http://slides.com/robertrouhani/sharpnav-06-08-14#/1

Jason, Vatsal, Solomon and  Ian taked about their project Andriate - for playing a sheet music in Android from a photograph of Sheet music. They nicely divided the work among the four. Two of them are working on Image Processing and getting the notes, one is working on Android and playing of music and the fourth one is combining all these subssytems. This seems to be an ambitious project. They are working hard to get a preliminary version before the end of summer.

There were lots of interesting questions and suggestions from students. As usual, I learnt a lot by attending these talks.  Slowly, all the videos of RCOS talks are being loaded in our youtube channel http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1 - Talks upto week 6 have been loaded.

It was decided that RCOS will have a hackathon on July 19th and 20th in AE 214, 215 and 216.

Awesome Job by the students and the mentors.