Week 6 (9/23/2014) and (9/26/2014) Fall Semester

We had two meetings this week - on Tuesday and on Friday. Despite the students being busy with their first exams and career fair, we had a good round of talks and a good set of presentations.

On Tuesday (9/23/2014) we had three talks

1) Dave Vorick - Start up Expereince

2) Huiye, Xitu, Xinchi, Wei, Yiding, Peiyang - ShengGuanTuhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/andhttp://shengguantu.weebly.com/blog
3) Jake Lowey - IntUI-Scrape - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/intui-scrape/

On Friday (9/26/2014) we had five talks

1)Browne - Docktor (For OS X)  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/docktor-for-osx/

2) Dennis Fogerty, Austin Gulati - Whats that Sample -http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/whats-that-sample/  (self mentored!?)
3) Kevin Fung, Chris Brenon - Chlorine  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/chlorine-opencl/ 
4) Sensen, Aaron, Sam, Amartrya, Shinya - RPI Clubs and Activiteshttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-tradebook/

5) Jorel Lalicki    URL redirection/enhancing http://yolome.me


Dave Vorick '14 gave an interesting talk based on his expereinces of building his startup - the ups and downs. He also talked about the technical issues (currency for distributed strogae). He talked both about theory (Byzantine protocols and cryptology) as well as the software aspects of them. His talk was very well received by the students after many interesting question/answer exchanges .

Jack Lowey talked about having a GUI to scrape information from websites. His aim is to scrape reddit, car sales and targeted sites.  He is making a steady progress (He is using python to scrape sites). The students advise not to scrape sites with no crawl in robots.txt. 

Huiye, Xitu, Xinchi, Wei, Yiding, Peiyang talked  about ShenGuanTu. The team has increased from last summer. But they have broken their group into people doing subtasks. Each of the group members talked about their contribution. Their talk looked impressive. They sowed a youtue version of their game steps. They are advised to integrate the different groups contibution into the main game earlier otherwise it may be difficult to do that later on.

On Friday, we had five talks.
Theo started giving the current status of his Docktor project for Macs. He has completed many aspects of that project.  He also plans to release a version for IPad. He is als planning to make it work under apples newest operating system.

Dennis and Austin arr working an android app to recignize the music that is being played and provide further information. It amounts to samling the music and comparing with a dictionary of music.  They have started and have a mock up diagram for their app.

Kevin and Chris talked about their near complete Chlorine system. It is an easy to prototype parallel programs using their system for graphics processors. It is written in opencl. They showed how to create parallel programs on the fly. They also demoed with writng a fractal program ad showed the speed up. It was awesome. This system is already used in Naval Ressearch Center (where Kevin worked as an intern).

Sensen, Aaron, Sam, Amartrya, Shinya talked about a website for clubs and activities. Their presentation detailed what the group was doing each week. (I really liked seeing them - It gives me a clear picture of their efforts). They have a website dedicated to their project. Their login system is almost working. Next task is to get the meeting times and events They also want to incorporate social aspect to their system (There was a pertinent question why some one would prefer this to a facebook group - They had an answer and I could not hear their answer properly - my only rationale it is a stand alone works even without a facebook account). There are a couple of useful suggestions about using other existing libraries to make their task easier.

Jorel gave a fascinating talk about URL enhancer/redirector. Unlike url shortneer, it enhances it (makes it bigger!). He has implemented using PHP. He gave a cool demo of this system http://yolome.me/ 

His presentation can be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ctsgSidJ27Czp47X42wHLLW0vNGzuePAmzv53QA-DyU/edit#slide=id.p and his repo can be found https://github.com/jorellalicki/yolomemegeneratorplugin . People interested in contributing to this project may contact hashtag@yolome.me 

Google groups https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/rcos-at-rensselaer/s-7kT7C_Y3Q

On the whole, it was a very good week - I thoroughly enjoyed all the presentations. I also get to meet some of our distinguished alumni who dropped on our Friday meeting.

Week 12 - Last Week (8/5/2014) and (8/7/2014) of Summer 2014

Week 12 - Last Week of Summer 2014

We had a cake to culminate the end of summer session 2014.  We committed many mistakes and we did learn from our mistakes - Hopefully we will not commit the same mistakes again. 

The following groups made presentations.

Tuesday (8/5/2014) (Attendance has been dropping like a ton of bricks)

1)   Qinglong Kong, Nanyu Zeng, Yang Wang, Tianbo Xie - Window Cleaning Robot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/clear-glass-project/ (mentor Jorel) - 2nd Talk

2) Daniel Baek and Nikil Sunilkumar - OpenIRT http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openirt/ and Sodexo Menu Parserhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/  (Mento Daniel) -2nd Talk

3)  Brian Corbin, David Claxton - Brewed  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/brewed/ (ind. project) - Brian's first talk

4)  Adam Susser - Dark Matter Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dark-matter-simulation/ (Mentor Nicholas)

5) - Jim Boulter, Emmett Hitz, & Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi - MeNext  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/ (Mentor Jim) - 2nd Talk

6)  Courtney Lang, Brandon McLear, Kirk Smith - Kitchen Assistant http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kitchen-assistant/ (Mentor Aaron) - 2nd Talk

7)  Andy Kakkaramadam, Stephen Romano - RoomScheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/roomscheduler/ (Mentor Andy) -2nd Talk

8) Huiye Liu, Xitu Chen, Eunkyoung Lee, Peiyang Ding, Yiding Zhang - ShengGuanTu http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/  http://shengguantu.weebly.com/ (Mentor Robert)

9) Matt Fenlon and Yeoni Lee - ILS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ils/ (mentor Soraya) - First Talk

10) Avi Weinstein - Asteroids implemented in Scheme/openGL (ind project)

Thursday 8/7/2014 (8 students attended our extra session meeting!)

11)  Avi Weinstock, Alex White, Hayleigh Sanders - Markov-grammatical-inferencer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mgi/ (mentor Joe) - 2nd Talk

12) Jorel Lalicki - Hacodex and others (NATPunch) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/hackodex/ (mentoe Nicholas) - 3rd Talk

13) Zexin Wan - open source card game cetner http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/ (mentor Jee Woong) - First Talk

14) Terrence Farrel - SpritzReader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spritzreader/ (mentor Connor) (by slides and youtube)

Despite my misgivings and misperceptions, most of the students did a creditable project. Wish they had worked harder and completed their projects (or complete their projects before the end of summer) - easier said than done (of course)

What follows is my understanding

Window Cleaning Robot team is in the 3d printing phase of their project.

OpenIRT is still in the design phase. Sodexo Menu parser has difficulty with the day of the menu parsing and spelling errors.

Open Brewary has a preliminary implementation - still some way to go - They are doing their project in IPhone.

Dark matter Simulation found that dynamic fraction may not be the cause of moncerous (/) ring.

MeNext has at least two to three weeks work left to get the two ends talking and to beta test their project.

Room Scheduler hasa lot of data to load and to hand convert into a SVG,

ShengGuanTu has at least three weeks left to get a skeleton of their game working.

Interactive Liquor System had an arduino breakdown. They abandoned their initial implementation in Python - They will be doing it in C or C++ . There was a lvely discussion about adding new features and usefulness of this system.

Asteroid simulation (an independent project) was talked by Avi. he used Scheme and JOGL to implement his system.

Zexin talked about his opensource card framedwork. It still needs considerable work to release an alpha version (written in Java)

Avi, Hayleigh talked MGI (puprose was to learn the programming language OCaml)- Avi did some parser for Natural language like grammar (markov grammar) and display parse tree. He also used Markov Grammar to  generate sentences (depending up on the Markov-ness the sentences made sense or not0. He then showed how to parse those sentences. Hayleigh talked about Qlearning Algorithm to predict the states. Since she could not use Natural Language models, she experimented with Prisoner's dilemna and showed results.

Jorel talked about his projec NatPunch which will facilitate peer to peer gaming without the need of a server. he explained  the theory and his methodology.. He implemented using PHP. His presentation elicited a number of questions from the aprse (but attentive) audience. He then talked about Hacodex. He tried to implement using Django and he  was not satisfied with it (He dislikes programming in Python) and Django may be an overkill for Hacodex.

Terrence sent me slides for SpritzReader as this will be his first talk (and he could not be at RPI because of medical appointments). He had a video of his  demo https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2uVnShx62s_ME9DcjNFSlg2c00/edit?usp=sharing_eil As per his email, " I'm not ready to publish the app yet as I feel it isn't complete, but hope to continue working on it this fall semester, hopefully with a couple of friends."

I was a bbit disappointed mostly with myself - my inability to motivate the students to accomplish what the projects promised. May be I am running out of steam or I am out of touch with reality! Any way a sad state for me to be in :(

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!