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 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.