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 8 (10/6/2014 and 10/10/2014) Fall Semester 2014

We are past the mid point of the semester. Raymond Jacobsen (Past RCOS member) Alex Freska (RCOS member) , Julius Alexander won Hack Uostate 2014 held in Syracuse University

http://www.dailyorange.com/2014/10/hack-upstate-promotes-collaboration-sees-attendance-increase/

This week on Tuesday(10/6/2014) we had the following presentations:
Unfortunately I was unable to listen to the last three talks (because of my freshman advising session)- On the other hand all the students have psoted their presentations and I was able to read and comprehend as much as I can.

1) Kevin Zheng - Lights Out http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lights-out/
(Mentor Jim Boultier)
2) Kiana McNellis, Sam Seng, Jesse Freitas - HW Server
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/homework-server/ (Mentor Aaron Gunderson)
3) Branden Clark, Ze Qin, Toshi Piazza - Dynamorio
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/ (Mentor Joshua Makinen)
4)  Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman - RPI Walk
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-walk/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)
 5) Kevin O'Connor - PuckmanLabs
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/puckmanlabs/ (Mentor Kevi O'Connor -self
mentored?)

Lightsout project is a mobile application to remind drivers to turn of their car lights after they reached their destination. It sends email notifications. The android app is almost complete. IPhone App is in the implementation phase. He is planning to release the software at the end of the semester.

HW server is going in full swing. They are planning to release an api so that other classes can use this. They showed a nice demo of their current system. They are well on their way to complete this project if not this semester (hopefully by the end of this year).

Dynamorio (Dynamic Library Instrumentation Proram) is a project that has been going strong for the past two years. They have psoted their talk slides here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/110SA9KDOnI712bzJ8GLXMWSo6JewETaEGJlTmToeylw/edit#slide=id.p  They are working on the heap stack for callback visualizations

RPI walk is progressing along very well.They are redesigning the UI and optimizations on the route - Final aim is to make the routes similar to google maps. Very well done project.

PuckmanLabs is to provide uniform APIS for various data manipulations. The goals are to have cataloged data sets, access control, lightweight support and community support. He has finished scrapper framewrk, Works and APIframework. he is yet to finish the first data set (and more tests), and wrapping the API and deploy. His talk slides are here http://slides.com/kevinoconnor7/urpiapi#/

As usual there were many interesting questions during meeting as well as off line.


On Friday (10/10/2014) we had the following presentations:

) Kienan Knight-Boehm - Parsing Wikipedia
2) Wyatt, Drake, John, Mason, Lavin - Aro CMS
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/aro-cms/ (Mentor Kevin O'Connor)
3) Robert Rouhani, Ariel Lee - SharpNav
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sharpnav/ (Mentor Kevin Fung)
4) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/
(Mentor Aaron Gunderson)
5)  Aesa Kamar, Elizabeth Dinella, Satoshi Masuura, Jake Mdogz -
MobaJoy http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobajoy1/ (Mentor Joshua Makinen)

Parsin Wikipedia is a fun project started to learn by doing (fusing the concepts of algorithms, parsing and data structures). He narrated his experiences of downloading incremental wikipedia files (huge) and how to edit/parse and getuseful information out of it. Finally he was able to take one wikipedia downloaded file and render it as a HTML file. 
His talk slides are found here http://slides.com/kienankb/hitchhiking-wikipedia
His takeaway point is -Homeworks are not as fun as doing projects and getting frustarted with and finally succeeding.
He prefers Hackathons. I thought RCOS provides sucha  forum - I could be wrong.

AroCMS is a new content management system written in javascript using mean stack (mongodb, express, angular and nodejs). It is simple, light weitght, usercentric, friendly UI and scalable. They have finished Plugin Recognition, Database binding, HTML compiler . They have to do plugin sandbox, implement ui and testing. Their talk slides are found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1_V3UKRVUnFeJOqTJAlZM0siUHkfg_ScD7uivfkhwqGw/edit#slide=id.g48cc14245_148  It si a big project and needs user base to succeed. Hope this project achieves its goals.

SharpNav is going in full swing.He has released a0.9 version - has some bugs need to iron out the inks. Make it more unity friendly. His system seems to fill a void in the gaming community.

OpenLab is moving along well. He is making a good progess and showed a demo. There are some interesting problem that still remain to be solved. He showed a demo too,

MobaJoy is a project with an added hardware to play the league of legends game. They are resolving multiple inputs (frommouse and the hand held devise) to process the requests. They are making steady progress,

All in all I learnt a lot form listening to these talks and the perceptive questions asked by the students.

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Last week's hackathon (7/19/2014) was a great occassion to get some work done. A fraction of the rcos group showed up . Many thanks to Jorel and Robert for awesome help and contribution. They went above and beyond to get this done. We even had an official photographer come by to shoot some photos!

Only two more weeks left for the end of the summer. Here is a re-re-revised list of talks today.  Great to see so many smiley faces on http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ page - Please keep up the good work and keep the momentum going. 

1) Chenrui Cao, Kai Kang, Xi Xi, Juntao Zhuang - 2W http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas) 2nd Talk - Great

2)  Charles Machalow - cDashboard - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (mentor Charles)  2nd Talk - Great

3) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/ (mentor Niccholas) 2nd talk - Great

4) Tracy Marholin - Music Theory RPG- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/music-theory-rpg/  2nd Talk - Great - no code updates in Observatory?

 

5) Sami Modak, Tong Liu - Anti-Distracted Driving, http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/anti-distracted-driving/ (mentor Andy) -

6) Sean Hagan - Plan Of Study - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-plan-of-study/ (mentor Connor)

7) Dan Bruce, Gabe Perez - NMS - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/polytechnic-nms/ (mentor Connor)

8) Zexin Wan - OSCGC- (Open Source Card Game Center) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/(mentor Ji Woong) 

9) Michael Hosier -  Open Cores- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/opencores/ (mentor Jorel) 

10)  Soraya Fouladi, Andrew Kaiser, Theo Browne - RPI CS Website -

11) Abby Lopaty - Water tag gun - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/water-tag-gun/ (mentor Soraya)

Chenrui, kai, Xi and juntao talked about their 2W ssytem (when and where on Androids). The data base lies with client (in SQLite). they showed a demo of the system and it is pretty functional. They plan to include abbreviations, maps and the data updated. They plan to release to the Android market before the beginning of Fall semester.

Charles gave his second talk about CDashboard. He worked on the comments that he recieved during his first talk. He fixed a racing condition bug, improved stopwatch, no clipping of photos/slide show. He showed a demo. It is written in C# and looks like a cool system,

Nicholas gave a second talk on OpenLab. He has fixed the crash problem. As per his blog post "We're very proud to announce version 1.0 of OpenLab. This release includes an extensive plugin framework, loading config files, editing config files on-the-fly, and saving them back to xml. Coming up next is calibration and logging plugin support." - Open Lab version 1.0 is out - Hope others will start using it. Jorel had a nice suggestion suggesion about the paarameters setup for serial interfaces,

Tracy gave her second talk about music theory RPG. She is getting the ngame mechanics working. She is using PyGame (which she found sometimes difficult to use) - She may shift to Unity in future. As of the moment she is going to have a version of the game (playing against an enemy) for notes,, chords and rhythms etc,

Sami and Tong talked about AntiDistracted Driving. The idea is to prvent texting while driving. They find when they are driving by using accelermeter sensor. If the velocity exceeds certain value, they will lock the texting capability. Tong was concentrating in calculating positions and velocities (of doing a double and single integeral of accelerometer data- The integration introduces noice - Tong is trying to reduce the error). Som suggestions cam about using a periodic GPS data to correct the errors. Sami is working on  locking the key oard if the velocity exceeds certain value. They are doing this for Androis and IPhone platform. There were a lot of interesting suggesions to this group. They hope to have a version before the end of the summer.

Dan and Game talked about NMS (news Management System). They are writing from scratch. This will be the poly website. They gave a demo of their system. they want to ring out this system by fall (or at least concurrently run with their old wordpress based system).  Their system accounts of multiple positions and multiple authors. They want to build some features that are present in http://rpitv.org/

Michael is building a open source video controller using FPGA.  The main objective of open cores is according to  http://opencores.org/opencores,mission

"Our main objective is to design and publish core designs under a license for hardware modeled on the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for software. We are committed to the ideal of freely available, freely usable and re-usable open source hardware."

Michael's main subobjective is o contribute o Opencores in this fashion- accorsding to his projects page  "plan to contribute to OpenCore’s project categories of Video Controller and Communication Controller (http://opencores.org/projects) through the development of an LVDS LCD controller (similar to this project: http://g3nius.org/lcd-controller/) and a communication controller for communicating through Display Port with the ultimate goal of making the two compatible with each other and with other projects on OpenCores."

Michael hopes to have his system (software will be in VHDL) before the end of the summer session.

Soraya, Andrew and Theo are remaking RPI Cs website. They are doing it Ruby on Rails. Soraya had a mockup sketch of the opening page (There were good comments/feedback on that - change the color to red, white and black). Andrew and Theo are working on hte backend. They solicited help from RCOS students to get the project done. This is a high profile project and has to be done before the beginning of Fall semester. Their talk slides can be found in https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dZzVNOUxYYVNxLWFFZ2hESFF4YldFazJzdHRZ/edit

Finally Abby talked about building Water Gun. She is doing fluid mechanics calculations, structural analysis to build water Gun. She is leaning on building a skeleton instead of a skin. Since she got the material late, she will be unable to complete the project before the end of summer. But she hopes to have the simulation done before the end of summer. She is planning to use 3 D printing and low cost materials.

The talks are interesting and questions were also interesting. I am getting discouraged by the apathy shown by some students. A few students do not update blogs, post code and not give talks. I feel awful and I am helpless!

Week 6 Summer 2014 (6/24/2014)

Week 6 Summer 2014 (6/24/2014)

We are in the dog days of Summer (past Summer Solstice on June 21st). Despite the heat 9actually it is not that hot), sudents are working hard and the projects are coming along. I need to get in touch with mentors to get more information about the progress of each project (I am still bewildered by the large number of students - my own fault!)

This week we had six talks:

1)  Kit Hammer and Noelle Todd - (Pantry Client) Client DB http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-pantry-client-database/

2) Huiye Liu, Xitu Chen, Eunkyoung Lee, Peiyang Ding, Yiding Zhang - ShengGuanTu  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/  (Please add all group member names in the observatory project page)

3)-Maia Marchetti -  Milkyway@home Expansion http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/milkywayhome-server-expansion/

4)  Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/

5) Joe Allen and Joe Eduardo - Jojo http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/jojo/
 

6) Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman - RPI Walk   http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-walk/

Kit and Noelle are working on a Food pantry database for a local food shelter. Their software is wanted by at least one client. Both Kit and Noelle know about the customer's needs. Noelle is working on the backend using SQL and PostgressSql and Kit is working on the front end. They have done a preliminary design and implemented portions of it. Since the client has an old PC, the team is designing a sosftware system that can run on any machine. They have also posted their slides. here is a link to it. http://goo.gl/wyreG2  Hope oters follow their footsteps and share their presentations.

Huiye, Xitu, Eunkyoung, Peiyang and Yiding are working on an ancient Chinese game . Here is a techincal paper http://www.jstor.org/stable/4132278  Acccording to the author of this paper, "It can be argued that board games reflect the society in which they are conceived. Thus Monopoly reflects the entrepreneurial spirit of a capitalist society, while the Chinese game of Shengguan tu  or "Promoting Officials" reflects the obstacles confronting officials throughout their careers.' On the scaled-down reality of a Monopoly board, players can  display their entrepreneurial talents by acquiring desirable properties. By increasing the number of buildings they construct on these plots, owners charge ever higher rents until the other players run out of funds. By contrast, success in Shengguan tu is measured not only by the amount of funds that a player accumulates on his way to high office, but also by the prestige that the office confers on the holder." 

 To a novice's eye (that is me), it looked like a snakes and ladder game - but a lot more complicated. This game is also based on Ancient Chinese History and a strateg based game. It is a multiplayer game. They are developing this game in unity. There were a number of suggestions. One of them is to scale down theor game so that tye can build a prototype before the end of the summer. The group has done a number of sceneries involved in the game.

Maia talked about Milkyway@Home Expansion. This is part of the Milkyway@Home project. She has  modified a lua file so that it will simulate several dwarf galaxies at once. She showed a video of this phenomenon having two dwarf galaxies. She has been working on the server code using an alpha project sets up on the milky way@home server.

Nick has been working on an Open Lab Project - open source version of LabVIEW - of course not the full version - but  with only a few features and a few innovations. H ehas serial input device working from both input and output side. He has written a lot of code using C sharp. There were a number of suggestion from different students about which packages Nick could use to further improve/develop his program.

Joe and Joe talked about their online gambling/gaming platform for competitive players. The games they are considering are deterministic games. It is based purely on strategy and not on luck. It is also a perfect information game (I think).  They are building a siple game of a shooter - The amount ammunition one gets is based on the amount he invests. In future the team wants other people to develop games for their platform. There were a large number of questions and suggestions from the audience. 

Finally Ezra and Tahsin talked about their android application RPI Walk. Tahsin is doing the front end of user interface and Ezra is working on the back end. They are using Open Street Map for their map of buildings and the open source route finder to find routes. Their route finder and the time it takes part of their program is done. They are working on the notificaion of wen to leave the building so as to arrive in a particular building (called notifier) and multiple routes. They are making great progress and they are making weekly blog posts too.

As usual I learnt a lot by attending these talks. Hope many of these projects succeed and make the students and RPI and RCOS proud!