Week 8 (3/19/2013) Spring 2013

Week 8 (3/19/2013) Spring 2013

 Deers braving snow-storm in Troy

Despite the snow storms string Monday and lasting through mid Wednesday (3/21/2013-3/23/2013), RCOS meeting went as planned.  The attendance is pretty good and the presentations were awesome as usual. We had seven presentations this week:

1) Matt O'Brien-Archer'sFriend http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/archers-friend/

2) Austin McGuire, Daniel Felizardo, Tianyi Chen and Kevin Fung- Rate My Stream  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rate-my-stream/

3) Mike Agnew - Schenectady Online Reservation System (ReserveMe/PermitMe)  - http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/reserveme/

4) Zachary Clapper Penguin Electronics Inventory Management System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/

5) Varun Madiath - Haskell SSH Client  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/haskell-ssh-client/

6) Dan Vegeto, Jesse Freitas, Doug Norton and Eric Zang - Collective Congress  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

7) Joshua Makinen and Stephen Hammer - Resistance Color Scanner http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/resistance-color-scanner/

Matt O has been progressing  along with his Archer's friend. He has been doing his implementations on Android 4.1 and up. He hopes to release his version of the software before the end of this semester.

Rate my stream team have been progressing along well. They even showed a demo of their system. They have even posted their slides in their blog! 

Mike A's progress with ReserveMe has been going well. He has met with Schenectady Council and they are satisfied with his project. His software is planning to be used this summer.

Zach's project has been hampered by the lack of progress in the back end of the system. Zach has been progressing along with GUI and his javascript code.

Varun and Bharath talked about ssh client library for Haskell.  They have implemented  handshaking protocol and showed a demo.

Collective Congress group is progressing along well. They have modularized their system and rewritten many of their original code. They hope to have an alpha version by the end of the semester.

Resistance color scanning is making a dent - They are trying to get the resistance (as an android) by scanning their color code - They are planning to good image processing library to improve their system -

It was a hectic Tuesday - but well attended and a lot accomplished.

Week 12 (11/20/2012) Fall 2012

Week 12 (11/20/2012) Fall 2012

With the thanksgiving week around the corner, many students had gone home. With the help of Christian I tried to stream the talks using google hang out - The idea was good - but the audio was not great. Above is a proof (Shawn is giving his talk) my attempt to stream the video. 

The following students presented their talks.

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

2) Alex Freska,Patrick Teague and Brian Le Flowur
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

3) Zach Clapper Penguin Electronics Inventory Management System
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/

4) Jorel Lalicki - PILED, Corsair,
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/in-depth-tutorial-of-embedded-electronics-using-the-ti-msp-launchpad/
 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi..

5) Jeremy Schneider - Rock Scissors Paper - learning game https://github.com/schnej7/RockPaperScissors

Shwan gave a talk outlining the progress. His reverse engineering is going well. Brendan is learning the ropes - learning how to deassemble the code.

Alex and Brian talked about the progress of Flowur - their flowchart program. But for the edge connections to block everything else is going smoothly - They have a few templates. They hope to release a version before the calendar year end.

Zach is continuing his project on Penguin electornics Management System. Zach is working on Javascript front end and it has been going well. He hopes to have a version readyby the end of the academic year.

Jorel was successful in getting his kickstarter project funded. he plans to get the board fabricated and ship out the product by February. Jorel and Tim are making the tutorial for TILaunchpad. Jorel talked about his Corsair project. He is planning to use node.s and his initial design and partial implementation is completed. Jorel is ambitious and he wants to have corsair deployed before Spring semester.

Jerry talked about his learning program to play rock paper scissor game. He has developed many schemes and he is currently ranked 7th. He talked about various strategies he has employed. As I write this blog I read an article in http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/24/science/scientists-see-advances-in-deep-learning-a-part-of-artificial-intelligence.html todays newyork times about the importance of deep learning!

Even though there were not that many students attending the talk(rightly so), I greatly enjoyed the talks and the ensuing discussions. 

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

RCOS Poster Presentation on Oct 5, 2012

Exams, Homework, Projects and RCOS are going in full swing for RCOS students. They have been doing an outstanding job so far.  Six groups of students gave a poster presentation during Enterpreneur of the year Celebration, We had our usual presentations and discussions during our weekly meeting.

 Zachary Clapper  on Penguin Electronics Management System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/ 

Zach gave a nice presentation on Electronics Inventory Management System.  Zach is working on the front end. Zach, being a JavaScript expert, rightly chose Javascript as his implementation language. There are a few other people working on this project. Please take a look at the blog written by http://penguin-electronics-inventory.blogspot.com/ Zach's presentation prompted a number of interesting suggestions and questions.

Remy Artega  (Servino Center) on Open Source Business Models 

Remy works with Servino Center and he is a serial enterpreneur. Remy gave an excellent presentation on the pitfalls of start up ( As he puts it, 90% of the start ups fail). Remy gave tips how to do a start up - Have a mock up, know the customer base and source of revenue. More importantly Remy suggested ways of starting open source business ventures. Many students expressed an interest.

David Vorick Blind64 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blind/

David talked about Bind64.  His program automates some of the tedious procedures involved with encoding using x264 (this is a video encoding program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264 ) x.264 is a successful free and open source program but it is tedious to use. Bind64 will free up some of the tediousness of these tasks.  There were interesting questions about whether a good documentation will be better than a program to simplify the tasks (I can only smile whether any one reads a documentation - one does not even read emails!)

As usual it is an enjoyable Friday late afternoon spent in the company of bright and eager minds.