Week 11 (4/9/2013) Spring 2013

Week 11 (4/9/2013) Spring 2013

Last week was an action packed week will be an understatement - With spring weather teasing us and end of the semester looming up on us,  our hands were full with activities. One of the high lights among many  was the use rpi-rfid reader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer-phrequency-identification/  to take attendance.  And of course Alfred  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alfred/ was on display during accepted students day. I will be remiss if I did not mention the cool rcos cube (image above) with rcos on sides and an open hardware and one software other two sides (Thanks Jorel for designing and making the cube). We have our usual talks by the students

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

2) Mike Agnew - Schenectady Online Reservation System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

3) Shawn Denbow, Brendan Clark Dr. Memory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

4) Austin Gulati - University Hacker Olympics

5) Chris Celi - Topsoil  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/topsoil/

6) Jorel Lalick, Monica Kosciuk, Justin Jones, Jonah Gruber, Brian Barnes OpenSourceSpectrometer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-spectrometer/

Matt has been doing a lot of cool and interesting projects.  His muting system announcemnets (like email notification in Macs) is a very cool project. I will not be able to give adequate justification of his projects by writing tidbits.  He has posted his slides here - Please read it. It is awesome and  his demos were impressive.

Mike has been progressing with his PermitMe/ReserveMe . Mike has met with Schenectady municipal officials. Mike has a simple UI and he has been making use of twitter bootstrap.  Mike hopes to release his system before summer.

Shawn and Brendan have made a lot of progress with Dr. Memory. Shawn is working on system calls for win 32 and Brendan has been documenting the system calls.

Austin briefly talked about the advantages of participating Hacker Olympics (He participated last year). Hacker Olympics (local chapter) was held yesterday (April 13, 2013)

Chris has been making progress with his idea sharing/growing project. He has implemented most of his work (using Ruby on Rails)

Jorel, Jusin, Jonah, Brian and (Monica) talked about their Open Source Hardware/Software Spectrometer. They have made prototype using arduino. They were able to get good results so far. Many high schools are interested in their spectrometer.

It has been a tremendous educational experience for me  Both presentations and questions were excellent. It was a well spent Tuesday evening as usual.

 

Week 11 (11/13/2012) Fall 2012

Week 11 (11/13/2012) Fall 2012

Today was total solar eclipse in New Zeland and Australia (happened around 3:30 pm EST) - I was watching it in google hangout - almost missed attending the wonderful meeting of RCOS. Jorel has uploaded almost all the video of  talks in youtube. RCOS channel is http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1  We had  six talks to day.


1) Matt Zanchelli Sonar and  IOSPasscode http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ios-passcode/

2) Kyle Keraga and Shoshana Rubinstein CLASS Initiative - Study Groups

3) Asher Glick Rensselaer Phrequencey Identification http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rensselaer phrequency-identification/

4) Thomas Chestna Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

5) Prof. Magdon Malik Ismail

6) Damian Mastylo, Austin Gulati, Chris Celi   The Collegiate http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-collegiate/

Matt Z started off with his IOSPasscode and explained some of the details. It is already in the appstore and has been downloaded at least 1000 times and has been getting good reviews. He is currently making his system available in many languages. Matt also demonstrated the working his system. His current project Sonar is for reporting bugs. He has been making a steady progress and he has not integrated with mailer yet.  There were interesting discussions.

Kyle and Shoshana (Student Senators)  presented a project from Student .Senate. They want to develop a system to form study groups. They want to have this system as an opt out system. Their proposed system uses data from rpilms and registrar. My main concern is the privacy issues and administration trusting students developing the system - Of course once the system is developed some one has to maintain it.  Hope the student senate is powerful enough to resolve this. Interesting discussions followed.

Asher presented RFID project. Their system used Processing for GUI . Because of lack of portability, they are moving to PyQt. Asher showed a demo of the working of his system. Right now it works only with a laptop/computer. RFID works like a charm. Hopefully RCOS will be able to use the system for taking attendance :) Stand alone system has some bugs and they are ironing out. Hopefully RFID will be rolled out soon. A lot of questions/suggestions were made by the students. 

Tom presented his Scrtiny system. He has been doing a lot oof back end job. He is trying to parallelize his back end to make it faster. He plans to have a nice gui to highlight the similarity and differences of programs. Tom plans to test out with instructors in programming intensive courses.

Prof. Malik gave an interesting tutorial on Machine learning. He peppered his talk with thought provoking questions and puzzles. He talked very briefly about supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforced learning. He also cautioned about overfitting data. He closed his talk posing  three challenging puzzles.

Damian, Austin and Chris talked about their Android project to help maintain schedules/classes/exams/how to get good grades etc. They have made substantial progress. They also have evenly divided their project among the three of them- It is an impressive achievement for any one - especially for a freshmen group. They plan to release a version by the end of this semester.

All the talks were excellent - as usual I learned a lot from listening to the talks as well insightful questions from other students.

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.