Week 15 (5/8/2015) Spring Semester

We are racing to the finish line. Mentors are playing a great role this semester. The small grop meetings really make a difference and get the groups going. They also help with the technology stack  that the students need.

We had these ten presentations on Friday:

 1) Theo Browne, Greg Bartell - inSquare
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/insquare/ (mentor Theo Browne)
2)  Shinya Hirata, Amartya Chakraborty, Aaron Cheng, Sensen Chen
-rClubs -  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-tradebook/ (mentor Jorel
Lalicki)
3) Mike Dewey , Mitch Mellone - Bluedash -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blue-dash/ (mentor Eric Oswald)
4) David Wang, Tommy Fang, Aman Zargarpur, Austin Gulati - Pokemon RPI
 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Samuel Yuan) - No
blog update
5)  Robert Rouhani, Shanye Jiang -SharpNav -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sharpnav/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)
6)  Derek Meer - OpenWSN - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openwsn/
(mentor eric Oswald)
7) David Chen, David Ivey, Joseph Shvedsky - Share-It:
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/share-it/ (mentor Brian Kelley)
8)  Sida Chen, Liyu Pan, Yitong Wu, Yuan Feng - Multi-Link -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/multi-link/ (mentor Brendon Clark)
9)  Ruben Madera, Cameron Root - Pentadactyl -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pentadactyl/ (mentor Theo Browne)

Some highlights:
inSquare has been downloaded a few hundred times - different clock faces (UI Design) for pebble watch. Programming is harder wth limited memory. Pebble has only two colors.
rClb showed a demo - They have done what they could. They showed fast/approximate search (search with spelling mistakes)
Blue Dash showed a demo. They have progressed well. This is for the formula SASE car. They created a custom dashboard with ardunio nano and blue tooth. It may have more general applications.
Pokeman RPI showed a demo. They have created all the basic block, They want to custom create the scenes with RPI background.
SharpNav has a number of contributors and users. So this project (finding paths) has matured .
ShareIt allows one to share the contacts, They use Ruby on Rails on the bakend and have Android and ios on the front end. Their slides are here http://slides.com/robertrouhani/sharpnav-8#/
OpenWSN group has designed a hardware chip and firmware for wireless sensor network. This project is working with UCB project on internet of things. Their slides are here http://slides.com/derekmeer/openwsn2015#/
Multi link allows one to get the status o various devies in one console. They started with peer to peer - settled on Client Server. They stil have some ways to go.
Pendactyl is a firefox plug in to have editor command to interact with a browser. They have done a good job of bringing this project to fruition. This group thanked their mentors.

Because we had a large number of presentation, we did not get as many questions as normaly we would. There were sufficient probing questions that heped the presenter as well as me.

I am happy with the way that the semester has progressed and ending!

Week 13 (11/18/2014 and 11/21/2014) Fall Semester 2014

 Week 13 (11/18/2014 and 11/21/2014) Fall Semester 2014

Grapefruit Poster

Where R U Poster

This week was yet another hectic week  RPIHack went last week very well (thanks to the excellent organization by Jazmine, Robert, Sebabtian and Jacob). It was well covered in the local media 

http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/Students-hackers-test-their-mettle-at-RPI-5895847.php
http://www.troyrecord.com/general-news/20141116/rpi-hosts-inaugural-hackathon-hackrpi
http://albany.twcnews.com/content/785858/students-from-60-colleges-participate-in-hackrpi-event/
http://wnyt.com/article/stories/S3621561.shtml

Poly covered it here http://poly.rpi.edu/2014/11/19/rpi_hosts_first_hackathon/

We had poster presentation on wednesday - Some of the photographs are above. The posters were well appreciated by every one I talked. All these things make me blush - too much self - aggrandizing~

On Tuesday we had the following talks followed by RPIHack project talks:

1) Dennis Fogerty, Austin Gulati - Whats that Sample -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/whats-that-sample/ (mentor Severin
Ibarluzea )
2) Evan Thompson, Alex Vargas, Phil LaGambino, Tausif Ahmed - Spoiler
- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spoiler/ (mentor Jim Boulter)
3)Jorel Lalicki - #jorelsphone

Dennis and Austin are working on to recognize the music by a small sample. They have not scraped the music (and hence not populated their database). They are using a music sampling software library (could not get a demo working becaise of the change in ssytem). Hope they are able to pull off their project and come to a good conclusion.

Spoiler group is coming along - have implemented a few of the steps - logging of the speed seems to work. Their App will be a welcome to parents and friends of teenage drivers and inexpereinced drivers.

Jorel gave a design description of his phone - It is ambitious and has tools to electrical lab equioments. He has enough processing power. He seems to think that there is not much power consumption.

After these, Tho and his group talked about theor RPIHack project http://buzz-off.me/  an answer to clickbait infacebook. This is a chrome extension software. Joshua and his group talked about hdb (hilly billy debugger) which is a front end of a compiler placing print statements. Logan and his partner talked about their prize winning project (Humanitarian side) on an anonymous chat tool for LGBT community. Ji Woong Baek talked about a simple serial interface to Aurdino (please see here http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/audino/ ). All of them learned a lot of new things in RPIHack and did contribute to open source projects.

On Friday (11/21/2014) we had the following talks.

1) Kevin Zheng Lights Out - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lights-out/
(mentor Jim Bolter)

2) Peter Ryder, Blake Lingenau, Mike Macelletti -  Check Up -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/check-up/ (mentor Devon Bernard)

3)  Derek Meer and Michael Hosier - OpenWSN -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openwsn/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

4) Dan Baek, Robert Hannum, Jacob Abramson - RPI Mobile Dining Hall
Menu- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/ (mentor Dan
Baek)

5) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang - Pokemon RPI
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Jim Bolter)

Kevin Zhang release his beta version of Lights out (Andriod APP) to switch off lights in the car when one has reached the destination. His app does not consume that much power and has a number of features.

Check Up project (which is a combination of task manager and performance monitor) has come a long way. They are writing the script in a version of python. They showed an awesome demo.

OpenWSN (open wireless sensor network) is progressing along - mostly by providing JSON interface and understanding the code. This group also contributed some visualization. They are planning to develop a hardware with an open protocol stack.

RPI Mobile dining hall menu parser, despite the setbacks, has been coming along well. Robert has been writing his parsing software.There was a good suggestion to make his parsing task simpler. Jacobg is progressing along with incorporating sodexo menu in RPIMobile. The GUI needs some work, code cleaning - but a great progress.

PokemanRPI has been along well with custom map editor and the game engine They have a new member in their project. They are planning to release a version by the end of the Fall semester.

What a fantastic week with an active participation by RCOS students.

Week 9 (10/14/3024 and 10/17/2-14) Fall Semester

This week is a compressed week - to do 5 days work in 4 days time.  Since Tuesday is a Monday at RPI it added some conflicts.  On top of it, we had an open house on Saturday The above photograph shows RCOS students helping out with Open House. We had meeting both on Tuesday and on Thursday. On Tuesday we had a talk

1) Kirk Smith, Brendan Cazier, Altan Gulen, Lloyd Jones - BallotBoxhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ballotbox/ (mentor Theo Browne)

This group have progressed quite well. They have created a public voting and showed a demo running from a local server They are planning to move that a public webserver They are also working on private voting. They are using ruby on Rails. They are planning to implement a mobil version for Android. 

Their slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JuQNVFlToGvw6k_X_OcjeVFjbUW8pjV_qzt7eq8_QMo/edit?usp=sharing

On Friday we had two talks:

1) Kienan Knight-Boehm, Dylan Lingenau, Spencer Weiner, Barry Hu
- SelfSecured http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/selfsecured/ (mentor Theo Browne)

2) Derek Meer and Michael Hosier - OpenWSN
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openwsn/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

SelfSecured is amobile application for emergency situations.  They mentioned of te problem of git with android development framework. They divide their projec into four parts (panic button, timer, emergency services and docial) so taht all of them will be able to have a full understanding of the entire system. Their slides can be found here http://slides.com/kienankb/selfsecuredupdate1#/ They showed a demo of their system

OpenWSN is a open wireless sensor network project from Berkeley. Derek and Michael are contributing to the project.
They already have one bug and they are learning the big system  They are also implementing a JSON interface to OpenVisualizer.Their final goal is to create a cheap hardware which implements the standard protocol stack. Their talk slide is found here http://slides.com/derekmeer/openwsn1#/

There were excellent questions and suggestions. Usually they make understand the talks much better.
What a great educational opportunity for me and other students.