Week 11 (4/17/2015) Spring 2015

Spring semester is racing to a fast finish. Students are exceling in Hackathons, Research Symposia reaping awards.

We had four talks this semester.

1)  Charlie Machalow, Austin Henandez, Alexander White - cDashboard
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (Mentor Robert Rouhani)

2) Shane Aston - Alien Spoilers
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/alien-spoilers/ (Menotr Emmet Hitz)

3)  Sam Yuan, Yunang  Chin- GoMueller, Yijang Li -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/gomuller/ (Mentor Sam Yuan)

4)  Jake Martin, Erin Quin, Satoshi Matsuura, Noah Goldman -
OverNight: http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/overnight/ (no mentor yet!) -
Finalists in HackUMass!

Charlie, Austen and Alexander gave an update of their progress on cDashboard. Charlie is fixing bugs (improved menustrip artifacts and auto updates) adding minor features. Alexander is working on the easier plugin systems using MEF which enable dynamic plugins. Austen is working on cMaps using google maps api. He showed a nice demo.  Their talk slides are here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ULtqhstfKuuvAWkI42V5118A6JW5M4qqRL4Kvu9mXcc/edit

Shane is working on a sytsem to prevent reading spoilers from reddit. He has a web application in which users can specify which reddit subgroups are not to be read. He showed a demo of his system and the technology used (Django, Python, SqLite and some other cool stuff) in the system. I hope  he posts his talk slides and updtae his blogs!

Sam Yunang and  Yijang gave a talk about their android app to help maintain a fixed exercise schedule. They showed a demo of their implementations done so far.  They plan to use qr code reader of the exercise machine which wil help in how to use the machine effectively. Their talk slides are found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/17dJjhARUR3sYUemW32Vk9R7EQmi2BLXUuHWxy_LEEgI/pub?start=false&loop=false&delayms=3000&slide=id.p4

Jake, Noah, erin and Satoshi talked about their Overnight hardware app which will charge the android phone witout overcharging. They showed how Android phones hasve to be charged. Sice the charging is done  overnight, they couple an alrm with charging. Intially Android is charged at 50 percentage and a couple of hours before waking the android is charged at 100 percent. They are planning to make thieir hardware more robust and use an app to charge.  They also showed a demo of their project.  Pleae see their work at HackUmass http://hackumass-ii.challengepost.com/submissions and http://challengepost.com/software/overnight

Again a well spent Friday evening!

week 12 (11/11/2014 and 11/14/2014) Fall Semester

RCOS group is going strong. We are all busy with courses, projects, grading and Hackathon. It is good to be busy doing something than being idle!

On Tuesday we had the following talks

1) Charlie Machalow - cDashboard -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)
2) Jim Boulter, Josh Makinen, Justin Etzine- MeNext -
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/ (mentor Jorel Lalicki)
3) Aaron Gunderson, Burke Livingston , Joseph Lee, John Yannou, Amy
Zhang, Parker Haynes, Nathan Bernard - Whiteboard-
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/4xb/ (mentor Eric Oswald)
4) Laurie Wu - Travel/Interests Site (mentor
DevonBernard)
5) Sophia D'Antoine, Brandon Clark -Security Course/Web

cDashBoard has many new features added including Battery life remaining, cMOte )(media controller), spotify integration, cRemainder, cReviewer and cNotifier - He also designed the system according to software enginering principles- Got new feature requests. It looks like cDashboard works under windows 10 too. The demo went very well - impressive software.

MeNext was demoed with webinput. It was very nice - ith students voting for the song. Jim said about his update being gone and he plans to work the iPhone thing work. Because of the sound system, they could not test their software in RPIHack. But their project is very ncie - nearly completed.

Whiteboard also showed offt their system (running under AWS). Their website is in  http://uniwhiteboard.com/ Please test it and provide a feedback http://goo.gl/Xa1F3K  Their talk slides are found in
http://slides.com/aarongunderson/whiteboard-nov-11#/

Laurie is stating a new project Spontaneous Travel Agent.  - providing safety zones, walkable places, restaurnts using social networks. The project is still in its infancy. Hopefully it will take on.

Sophia and Brendon talked about the new security course that was being offered. They showed the binary exploits. Their talk slides (very interesting three programs) canbe found here http://rcos.rpi.edu/project/dr-memory/post/presentation111114/
and https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1jv7CZ4S29HG6QrgVmjXYZnOI5z_3VDr5GddekSz2FQU/edit

On Friday (11/14/2014) we had four talks.
1) Devon Bernard - Chrome Extensions & BrowserDB
2) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/
(mentor Aaron Gunderson)
3) Severin Ibarluzea, Kiana McNellis and Aaron Gunderson: New Attendence System

Devon gave a cool presentation of Chrome Extension for bookmark, nots and search management. BroswerDB is available in Chromestore https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/browserdb/bfobgfmimpgejgkoloppcoojoleolbll

Open Lab project is going on well. Because of the difficulty with Aurdino, this project is using cypress and proprietary sofwtare. It enhances openLab features. 

The new attendence system seems to be working well (People text a code to a specified telephone number) and the results are stored in google form. The codes chane every meeting. Their talk slides may be found here http://slides.com/severinibarluzea/deck--5#/

Most of the students are getting ready for RPIHack. As we speak that hackathon is coming to an end now. The organizers worked very hard on that.  You can hear the local news coverage here http://albany.twcnews.com/content/news/785858/students-from-60-colleges-participate-in-hackrpi-event/

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 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Week 10 (7/22/2014) Week 10 Summer 2014

Last week's hackathon (7/19/2014) was a great occassion to get some work done. A fraction of the rcos group showed up . Many thanks to Jorel and Robert for awesome help and contribution. They went above and beyond to get this done. We even had an official photographer come by to shoot some photos!

Only two more weeks left for the end of the summer. Here is a re-re-revised list of talks today.  Great to see so many smiley faces on http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ page - Please keep up the good work and keep the momentum going. 

1) Chenrui Cao, Kai Kang, Xi Xi, Juntao Zhuang - 2W http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/2w-when-and-where/ (mentor Nicholas) 2nd Talk - Great

2)  Charles Machalow - cDashboard - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/ (mentor Charles)  2nd Talk - Great

3) Nicholas Pitt - OpenLab http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openlab/ (mentor Niccholas) 2nd talk - Great

4) Tracy Marholin - Music Theory RPG- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/music-theory-rpg/  2nd Talk - Great - no code updates in Observatory?

 

5) Sami Modak, Tong Liu - Anti-Distracted Driving, http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/anti-distracted-driving/ (mentor Andy) -

6) Sean Hagan - Plan Of Study - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-plan-of-study/ (mentor Connor)

7) Dan Bruce, Gabe Perez - NMS - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/polytechnic-nms/ (mentor Connor)

8) Zexin Wan - OSCGC- (Open Source Card Game Center) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/(mentor Ji Woong) 

9) Michael Hosier -  Open Cores- http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/opencores/ (mentor Jorel) 

10)  Soraya Fouladi, Andrew Kaiser, Theo Browne - RPI CS Website -

11) Abby Lopaty - Water tag gun - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/water-tag-gun/ (mentor Soraya)

Chenrui, kai, Xi and juntao talked about their 2W ssytem (when and where on Androids). The data base lies with client (in SQLite). they showed a demo of the system and it is pretty functional. They plan to include abbreviations, maps and the data updated. They plan to release to the Android market before the beginning of Fall semester.

Charles gave his second talk about CDashboard. He worked on the comments that he recieved during his first talk. He fixed a racing condition bug, improved stopwatch, no clipping of photos/slide show. He showed a demo. It is written in C# and looks like a cool system,

Nicholas gave a second talk on OpenLab. He has fixed the crash problem. As per his blog post "We're very proud to announce version 1.0 of OpenLab. This release includes an extensive plugin framework, loading config files, editing config files on-the-fly, and saving them back to xml. Coming up next is calibration and logging plugin support." - Open Lab version 1.0 is out - Hope others will start using it. Jorel had a nice suggestion suggesion about the paarameters setup for serial interfaces,

Tracy gave her second talk about music theory RPG. She is getting the ngame mechanics working. She is using PyGame (which she found sometimes difficult to use) - She may shift to Unity in future. As of the moment she is going to have a version of the game (playing against an enemy) for notes,, chords and rhythms etc,

Sami and Tong talked about AntiDistracted Driving. The idea is to prvent texting while driving. They find when they are driving by using accelermeter sensor. If the velocity exceeds certain value, they will lock the texting capability. Tong was concentrating in calculating positions and velocities (of doing a double and single integeral of accelerometer data- The integration introduces noice - Tong is trying to reduce the error). Som suggestions cam about using a periodic GPS data to correct the errors. Sami is working on  locking the key oard if the velocity exceeds certain value. They are doing this for Androis and IPhone platform. There were a lot of interesting suggesions to this group. They hope to have a version before the end of the summer.

Dan and Game talked about NMS (news Management System). They are writing from scratch. This will be the poly website. They gave a demo of their system. they want to ring out this system by fall (or at least concurrently run with their old wordpress based system).  Their system accounts of multiple positions and multiple authors. They want to build some features that are present in http://rpitv.org/

Michael is building a open source video controller using FPGA.  The main objective of open cores is according to  http://opencores.org/opencores,mission

"Our main objective is to design and publish core designs under a license for hardware modeled on the Lesser General Public License (LGPL) for software. We are committed to the ideal of freely available, freely usable and re-usable open source hardware."

Michael's main subobjective is o contribute o Opencores in this fashion- accorsding to his projects page  "plan to contribute to OpenCore’s project categories of Video Controller and Communication Controller (http://opencores.org/projects) through the development of an LVDS LCD controller (similar to this project: http://g3nius.org/lcd-controller/) and a communication controller for communicating through Display Port with the ultimate goal of making the two compatible with each other and with other projects on OpenCores."

Michael hopes to have his system (software will be in VHDL) before the end of the summer session.

Soraya, Andrew and Theo are remaking RPI Cs website. They are doing it Ruby on Rails. Soraya had a mockup sketch of the opening page (There were good comments/feedback on that - change the color to red, white and black). Andrew and Theo are working on hte backend. They solicited help from RCOS students to get the project done. This is a high profile project and has to be done before the beginning of Fall semester. Their talk slides can be found in https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dZzVNOUxYYVNxLWFFZ2hESFF4YldFazJzdHRZ/edit

Finally Abby talked about building Water Gun. She is doing fluid mechanics calculations, structural analysis to build water Gun. She is leaning on building a skeleton instead of a skin. Since she got the material late, she will be unable to complete the project before the end of summer. But she hopes to have the simulation done before the end of summer. She is planning to use 3 D printing and low cost materials.

The talks are interesting and questions were also interesting. I am getting discouraged by the apathy shown by some students. A few students do not update blogs, post code and not give talks. I feel awful and I am helpless!

Week 7 (7/1/2014) Summer 2014

Week 7 (7/1/2014) Summer 2014

Despite this week being the July 4th week(end),  our meeting room AE 214 was nearly full with expectant and eager students.

This week we had seven(!) talks. The following groups presented their projects.

The following group will present their projects.

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

2)  Charles Machalow - cDashboard http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cdashboard/

(mentor Robert Rouhani)

3)  Liam Moynihan - LED Color Control http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/led-color-control/  (mentor Moorthy )

4) Eric Mattson, Aesa Kamar, James Lee - CardSharp http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/cardsharp/ (mentor Robert Rouhani)

5) Tracy Marholin - Music Theory RPG http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/music-theory-rpg/  (mentor - granfathered class - still willl like to have a mentor as some one to talk to ) Robert Rouhani

6)  Peter Kang and Kevin Andrade - AskRPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/askrpi/

(mentor Connor Ameres)

7)Parker Haynes - TextDump http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/textdump/ mentor Ji Woong Baek

Qinglong, Nanyum Yang and Tianho talked about their window cleaning robot. This is an open hardware project.  They have a prototype model o ftheir robot and showed a little demo. It uses suction (hydraulic)  and two directional beam for moving.  Uses sponges for cleaning. They showed their detailed design (cad model). They are trying to get a more powerful servo motor for suction and movements. Very nice pesentation over all and students had a number of suggestions. Their slides may be found here https://www.dropbox.com/s/th04ayshohsmq3y/Presentation1.pptx

Charles has been continuing withhis cDashboard project. in C# . He has made many nifty improvements to his dashboard, proper tiling, a stop watch and a scalable pic viewer. He has also fixed a number of bugs and made his system more stable. Students had a number of feature requestis to his system. His talk slides amy be found ere https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dTXN1dENYRkxxQThxSUNfZDB5Z1BLUkxrY2U4/edit

Liam talked about his LED color control project. He is coding his project in matlab. The idea is given a set of LED's and the color output one desires, what should be the best possible mixing of colors. Liam has buid a nice GUI in latlab. He showed a demo of his project. This project is done jointly with Lighting Research Center. Sine he was looking for a mentor, I have volunteered to be a mentor.

Eric, Aesa and James presnted their progress in CardSharp. They are coding in C++. Gist is that they are calculating the conditional probabilities  of winning (using enumeration) with the present card deck. They have made some progress with implementation. They want to send a text message about the probabilities. One student suggested using google glass to compute the probabilities. Their talk slides amy be found here https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dbjVDWXh1T2NPVHV5RWpCd2xzR1p6Yno5TW5R/edit . 

Tracy presented her progress on MusicTheory RPG. She is coding it in PyGames. She gave a demo of a previous version of a girl walking around a tree in a meadow. The girl is able to understand the scenary and walk accordingly. Tracy's plan is to incorporate music notes in the scenary and the game is to ensure that the player understands music theory so that she can win/play the game effectively.

Peter and Kevin talked about AskRPI - a web interface where the students and faculty members can interact with both academic and nonacdeic questions. It will be like consolidating  Reddit and Quora features. They had a mock up. They want to include search facility (based on tags). They even had a mock up. This web application is built on Ruby on Rails.

Finally Parker talked about his progress on his project TextDump.nHis projects aim is to develo a simple mechanism for trasfer of files between two computers/virtual machines. He has (almost) a prototype working transfering simle textfiles between two systems He is coding his project in C++.  There were interesting suggestions and questions from students.

All in all, very interesting talks and I learnt a lo of new and cool technology, how to convey your ideas and how to present effectively. I also learnt how to listen and how to ask questions and how to provide suggestions.

All in all very interesting week,