Week 3 (week of 8th Septmber 2014) Fall 2014

With the forms submitted, RCOS picking up momentum.
We had these talks this week (both on Tuesday and Friday)

Tuesday Talks
Colin Rice '14 (Google) Mesh Networks
Rocco Del Priore - RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/
Peter Piech - RPIMobil http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile-for-android1/
Ramsey, Damian - GrapeFruit  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/grapefruit/

Friday Talks
1)Charlie Machalow - cDashboard  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/

2)Josh Goldberg - Bookswap  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bookswap/

3) Noelle Todd and Christina Hammer Food Pantry  Client Database http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-pantry-client-database/

4)Ji Woong Baek - Sodexo Menu Parser and RPIMobile
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile-for-android1/

On Tuesday, Colin Rice '14 (and RCOS alumni) came to RPI campus (part of google team) and gave a talk about Mesh network ( an efficient algorithm got communication)  He gave a succint tutorial  on meshnetworks ans different routing algorithms. he even gave a demo of a simple mesh network using his algorith, (Colin had implemented the code for the demo in Go)

Rocco talked about the problem he has been facing on releasing RPI mobile in the app store. Besides getting license for RCOS from Apple (some permissions are pending), server where the data is stored is also down. There are other UI issues and RPI shuttle app needs some fixing. Hopefully this app wiill hit the appstore.

Peter talked about RPIMobile. He has placed the latest version  has been downloaded around 200 times. There is much ore work to be done on this app too. From his blog post, it looks like there was a bug reported by RCOS alumni.

Damien and ramsey talked about the current state of grapefruit site. It has been used by at least three faculty members. Based on the feedback they were planning to improve the system. they have a number of developers lined up.

On Friday we had four talks (two of them are past projects - one in summer and one in last Spring).
Charlie talked about his current status of the cDashBoard. He mentioned about the number of bug fixes.
His cDashboard is running on Windows 8.

Josh gave a summary of his Spring RCOS project bookswap. He and another were the principal (among a team of 8 - many did not do any work) architects of bookswap. Josh and his friend used PHP templating and developed a fast display of pages The mobile version still needs work More importantly, he lamented the lack of usage of his system. (Josh's interests have changed since this project and he is not actively working on it) Hope some of the RCOS students take up and make this system usable not only to RPI but other uiversities too.

Noelle and Christina talked about their Client Side Food Pantry Data Base project. They have implemnted their project using python, intertk, sqlite. More importantly they have recieved feedback from the church which was planning to use their system They have modified their interface accordingly. Their system is going tobe used food pantry in a local church from the end of September 2014.

Finally  Ji Woong talked about sodexo menu parser - part of RPI Android project. He has used JSON and made his code more compact and more efficient. He showed the improvement in times to load the menus. One of the problems he encounters is the speeling errors associated with dates and menus. (He was going to use the string edit algorithm - with thanks to Dave Goldschmidt for his explanation in Intro to Algorithms).

Finally Jorel made sure that every project had a mentor. David Goldschmidt is coming with policies for the smmoth(er) running of RCOS.  I am confident that we will have an excellent semester

Week 12 (4/16/2013) Spring 2013

Week 12 (4/16/2013) Spring 2013

With the Grand Marshal week behind, we are in the final stretch of the semester. We had our usual set of fine speakers.

1)  Stephen Silber and Steven Perkins RPIMoble  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

2) Christian Johnson RPI Directory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

3) Ethan Bond, Raymond Jacobson Instant Dropbox Syracuse Hackathon

4)  Diogo Moitinho de Almeida, Bharath Santosh, Zach Jablons,  Puckmen in Kaggle Compettion

5) Diogo Moitinho de Almeida, Bharath Santosh ProtoML http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/protoml/

6) Tim McMullen, Awesome Wav http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/awesome-wav/

Stephen and Steve talked about their ongoing RPIMobile project. They have been progressing along. With UPE's server, they are planning to have their version in AppStore. Recent improvements include a nice event notifier, and an improved campus map with pins. They showed a demo of their system.

Christian resolved/helped fix the bug with google app-engine API. RPIDirectory is functioning again. Christian has incorporated a cool PhotoMap feature. You can check out here in http://rpidirectory.appspot.com/photomap

Ethan and Raymond talked about their experiences in participating in a hackathon in Syracuse. They won the second prize and a raspberry pi.  Their project involved an implementation of a fast drop box like feature for sharing (one need not download drop box) and just share an url. They implemented the whole system in a day (using ruby on rails)

Diogo, Bharath and Zach talked about their experiences in kaggle http://www.kaggle.com/ competition (machine learning) recently. They have decided the blue book value of bulldozers based the past data. they talked about their different techniques, what caused problems, and about bad data. Despite all this, the team puckman finished 101th among 478 teams  

http://www.kaggle.com/c/bluebook-for-bulldozers/leaderboard  (They slipped from the previous position of 27)

Diogo, Bharath also talked about their RCOS project ProtoML - They used many of the features of PortoML for their Kaggles competition. They showed a demo of their system.

Tim talked about his successful efforts in covering his steganography program Awesome Wav to work using threads. He showed a demo of his system. Tim has to resort to using PThreads for threads. Tim elaborated  his difficulties with the file i/o and how he resolved most of them.

As usual there were many interesting questions and suggestions. It was a great learning expereience for me as usual. I will be missing this next two weeks.

Week 9 (3/29/2013) Spring 2013

Week 9 (3/29/2013) Spring 2013

Semester is going in full steam and the seniors are eager to graduate and the rest are thinking of their summer internship. As usual all of them want to finish their exams/projects and working hard towards that.

We have our usual talks. The following students presented their talks

1) Rachael Redner, Nick Timakondu and Asher  Glick Zadatak http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

2) Scott Silber, Stephen Perkins RPI Mobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/


3) Alex Freska, (Ian Mcloughlin - where are you in Observatory dashboard) FlowUR  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

4) Jordan Yamada and Bharath Santhosh Alfred http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alfred

Rachael, Nick and Asher talked about Zadatak. Rachael is working on a new GUI for their application (in Android). She showed a nice demo of that. Nick is working on scheduling (back end) - He ran into some difficulties (algorithmic) and he has found a way to overcome. Asher is working on the interface between front and back ends. They expect an alpha release by the end of this semester.

Scott and Stephen talked about their RPI Mobile. They are progressing along well. They plan to include events. Steve is working on the server side (extending James McM's contribution).  UPE has promised to provide the servers for hosting their persistent data.

Alex and Ian talked about FlowUR. Their project is going smoothly. Alex s working on the algorithms for lay out. Ian is working on making this as a 3D appl.

Jordan and Bharath talked about Aflred, a beverage serving Robot. Jordan (and others) are working on the mechanical design and their implementation  They have completed the design in paper and they have started their implementation. They have thought through sensor problems and tires, breaks etc. Bharath is working on the software side (working with a tablet on Alfred). Alfred is supposed to be used on April 13th on accepted students day. Hopefully everything will work out.

Again an impressive talks and useful sharing of knowledge and suggestions made my day!

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Hackathon on September 22, 2012

All the RCOS application forms have been submitted to office of Undergraduate education. We have been picking up momentum and the students are active with doing their projects.  Thanks to Asher Glick, RCOS had a first hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012). Photo above was taken then.
We are officially in the Fall season.

Stephen Silber, James McM, Colin Steifel  RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

Stephen, James and Colin presented their progress with RPIMobile. IPhone portion of it has come along well. James is doing backend stuff and creating a SQLite data base. Colin is porting it to Android (he has just started). Asusual there were interesting questions and suggestions from the participant. Stephen showed a demo of his project (IPhone part)

Matt  Zanchelli  Sonar http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/

Matt updated about his two past project Cloud and Passcode..Passcode has been selected to be featured on Apple's Safari Extension Gallery.  Cloud piqued the interest of a start up!. Matt's current RCOS project is to write an easy to file bug reporter for Mac software. Matt has been progressing along.

Deon Robinson  FastAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

Deon has been working on linking Images to Data project for a while now. This is his official RCOS project this semester. The idea is to open source image and object recognition. The ultimate goal is to make augmented reality. You can read more about this  in his blog http://trymirage.blogspot.com/

Alex Freska, Patrick Teague, Brian Le, Jacob DeWitt   FlowUR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

Alex, Patrick, Brian and Jacob have been progressing with their FlowUr (Drawing flow charts). They are storing their flowcharts in SVG and most of the code is in Javascript and storing the charts in JSON format. They have a good routing algorithm. They have provided template mechanisms for others to make different drawings. They showed a demo. FlowUr project is progressing along well.

Thanks to Dr. Goldschmidt for writing last week's blogs. I should also appreciate all the mentors who re doing phenomenal things (along with their ambitious course loads and other activities).

I am honored to be associated with this group.

Week 10 (7/27/2012) Summer 2012

Week 10 (7/27/2012) Summer 2012

Summer Semester is slowly winding down. In two weeks the summer semester will be over. Projects are coming along well.

This week we had three talks.

1. Stephen Silber rpimobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

 

 2. Thomas King SMS Vending Machine http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sms-sending-vending-machine/

3. Jorel Lalicki, Tim Cantwell LaunchPad Tutorial http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/

 

Stephen had made an excellent progress. He is well on to releasing his app before the end of the summer. He has been getting feedback from various sources including here

Thomas's first prototype has been installed in Ghana and the prototype has been working flawlessly (Thomas got a text message when some one purchased!). Since then Thomas has made substantial improvements in power consumption (10 fold decrease from 56 mA to 5.6mA by changing into a sleep mode from a busy wait loop). Thomas is waiting to hear more feedback when the team returns from Ghana.

Jorel and Tim have made an excellent progress What is more impressive is that they have also posted their talk slides! Please see them here. Jorel and Tim are also planning to start a company - please wait to hear further details. I am looking forward to getting some experience with their products!

Again I had a great time listening to a set of  great set of talks and a great set of questions 

Week 9 (7/20/2012) Summer 2012

Week 9 (7/20/2012) Summer 2012

Cause - 7-18-2012

Effect 7-19-2012

Thanks to Asher, we had a successful hackathon on Wednesday (7/18/2012). The turnout was good, the food was better and the progress on the projects are the best - what more can I say.
Proof of the effect of the hackathon is shown above. (I am a firm believer of law of causality!) - this progress would not have been possible without a hackathon.

I have to thank mentors Jorel, Asher and Zach. They make my life extremely simple. With mentors like them RCOS can go a long way!

We had our usual talks this Friday (7/20/ 2012).

1. Priti,Kumar Rebecca Ehrhardt and Chelsea Poirier-Lightning Round http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/lightning-round/

2. Colin Neville Looking for a team http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/looking-for-team/

3. Austin McGuire, and Kegham Khosdeghian milkyway@home

Priti, Rebecca and Chelsea have made phenomenal progress (not as ambitious as they originally planned) - never the less looks pretty impressive to me. They have implemented around 20 games (mostly based on history) - they even showed their demo - I need some time to play that game. All in all a quite impressive task.

Colin has been making a steady progress on Looking for a team. What is impressive was that he was able to take the suggestions presented during his first talk. Colin showed a demo of his system. (it is a preliminary version) - Colin is planning to improve his system (make it robust) and take feeds from github, linkedin and facebook to make the ratings reliable.

Austin and Kegham have been working on Milkyway@home project. Both of them are making an excellent proress. One is working on N-body simulation and the other is working on separation. Please see this website to know what is going on with this project http://milkyway.cs.rpi.edu/milkyway/

Fabulous talks and a worthwhile afternoon to spend.

Videos of Talks presented during 6th Week

Bobby Zheng Chrnoicle http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chronicle/






Ian Ooi Big http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/big/



Silber RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/



Sheena McNeil koob kooc (Reverse of Cook Book) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/




King SMSVending Machine http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sms-sending-vending-machine/
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