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 7 (9/30/2014) and (10/3/2014) Fall Semester

We are at the half way point of our fall semester.   So many things are happening at RPI. Rensselaer magazine had a story about RCOS in the Fall 0214 issue (see the online version here )Things have been progressing along well. We had two meetings. http://hack.rpi.edu/ has been open for registartion.

On Tuesday (9/30/2014) we had these presentations

1) Robert Rouhani - Protips
2)  Daniel Baek  - PEP8: Python Coding Style

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

4) Rob, Vijay, Ylonka, Jacob, Josh, Chandrika - EMTags
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/emtags/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

5) Brian, John, Zachary, Aleksey -  Where R U?
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/where-r-u/ (mentor Jim Boulter)

6) Alex White, Joseph Eduardo - Command Chain
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/command-chain/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

7) Dimitar Dimitrov and David Kim - Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/ (menotr Dimitar Dimitrov - self mentored?)

Lead mentor gave a nice presentation called ProTips - how to make RCOS expereience. His talk slides may be found here http://slides.com/robertrouhani/rcos-protips#/

Python coding style was presented -by Daniel. His talk slides may be found here http://www.slideshare.net/hydroArgentum/pep-8-python-coding-style

Checkup is a windows process monitor - improves what perfromance monitor task manager does - finer time intervals.
Their presentation is here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G_v-GhdKZpaGrXo2mMMVH6XU7r6-YqWNAImennmTO7Y/edit  - Very fine talk and work. As usual a number of interesting questions were posed and answers were very illuminating.

EMTags is a project to help emergency situations. Instead of paper, they want to have electronic tags. Their talk may be found here https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A4143B7E9F94CF58!65125&authkey=!AM9-pD53v9BK_PA&ithint=file%2cpptx

Whereare U is a mobile application for ride organizer with GPS and Map integration. It is better than a facebook group (answer to a question) Their talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rj39cVEMqbPKgDkt3YgT-SxPZYCRHCBzQpJsJIdszHI/edit#slide=id.p

Command Chain is a system to allow the requirements, deadlines and other notfications acceptable to a chain of commands. It is meant as a stand alone system,

Pierce Logic has progressed to a state whre it is close to release. Now they are working to port it to touch sensitive screens, Their talk slides may be found here (Oh! Oh!! Dimitar did not send in his lovely slides)

On Friday (10/3/2014) we had these presentations

1) Laurie Wu Robotics hand, Open Hand Model T42
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-hand-model-t42/  (mentor Devon
Bernard)  - No Blog posts?

2) Sebastian Sarbora, Jazmine Ollinger, Veronica, Dan, Charlotte -
Neptune http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/neptune/ (mentor Joshua Makinen)
- last three names do not appear in Observatory

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

Open Hand Project was a fantastic project and very well presented  This project is to build an open source hand (designed at HHarvard)There was veen a youtube video. Her talk slides may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dMUVrdHBYOFNsMjdka3BSbFlFdUJ0am9HLXJZ/view?usp=sharing 

Underwater Robotics is an open source effort to make a project and make it inexpensive. It also has a n added feature of wireless communication. Their talk slides may found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TtipVGssuieGE7SN4Wmnz4KPIIUVUAZY_VudGJOsrO4/edit?usp=sharing 

Pokemon RPI is an ongoing project the pokeman with RPI as map. They are progressing along well with an expected release at the end of Spring Semester. Their talk slides may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dNWVOdWQwQmVTYkZzZzVpTkNJWThwYXllOThV/view?usp=sharing

All the talks were fantastic and I learned a lot by attending these talks.

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.