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 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 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.