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 4 ( Week of 15th September) Fall Semester 2014

We had a group photo taken on Tuesday a well as the photo of the mentors (see at the bottom of thi blog). As you can see from the photo, the group has grown by leaps and bounds.  Alo Jorel made sure that all the students had mentors and all the projects appear on the dashboard. Robert made sure that the remaining projects with no mentors have been taken care. The attendence during Tuesday wasrather strong (most students showed) - however the attendence during the Friday session was rather sparse (I do not know why).

On Tueday (9/16/2014) we had two talks:

1) Aaron Gunderson- Whiteboard  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/4xb/

2) Jim Boulter, Josh Makinen, and  Justin Etzine MeNext  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/

On  Friday (9/19/2014) we had two more talks

1) Paul Revere, Emmett Hitz - Vest http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/vest/

2) Gabe Perez (WebTech) - WebTech Projects and Flagship

The white board group has become a group of six. So they have split the work . Some are working on the back end, some are working on the mobile version and some are working on cheduling and the front end. Aaron alo showed a demo of his project/. This project looks quite promising. Their presentation elicited a lot of questions and suggestions.

Jim, Josh and Jutine talked about their project MeNext - video/song selection . They have implemented IPhone version and a web version (Android version is also on the works). They demoed a version of their system. MeNext is also a promiing project (they have scheduled to release it during November Hackathon at RPI). Their presentation also aroused a number of questions and suggestions.

On Friday we have two presentations. 

Paul presnted his project on Vest (emmett was absent). They are planning to scrape friends of victins. They are testug the hypothesis that friends of victims are more probable victims (froma theory proposed by an Yale Psychologist). They are planing to construct a database and then construct a graph.  They are planning to use Python and C++/ They are not planning to use Django as it is not a web-based systm.

Gabe talked about his project of Flagship project (and the changing of Concerto version 1 to Concerto version 2) -- Both of them are based on Ruby on Rails. He also talked about other WebTech Projects, myrpi, shuttle trackeer concerto and Rules and Elections website. Gabe gave a demo of all the systems. It was a very fine presentation..

All in all it was a week well worth spent listening to these talks and learning from them. Her e is a group photo of the mentors.

Week 9 (7/15/2014) Summer 2014

Week 9 (7/15/2014) Summer 2014

Summer session is speeding along. We have only three more meetings left. Hope most of the projects have been progressing well. With the upcoming hackathon (sign up link http://goo.gl/ePkBDe ) this coming Saturday, I do hope that there will be greater progress with the projects.

We had six talks this week. The following groups presented their progress with their projects.

1) Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman -  RPI Walk http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-walk/  (mentor Robert Rouhani) - 2nd Talk (great job)
2) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang, Aman Zargapur - Pokemon RPI  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Jim Boulter)
3)  Courtney Lang, Brandon McLear, Kirk Smith - Kitchen Assistant http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kitchen-assistant/ (mentor Aaron Gunderson)
4) Aaron Gunderson and John Yannou - Whiteboard http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/4xb/ (menotr Aaron Gunderson) 2nd Talk (great job)
5)  Andy Kakkaramadam and Stephen Romano - RoomScheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/roomscheduler/  (mentor Andy Kakkaramadam ) - 
6)  Ravi Panse and Henry Choi - RPHub  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rphub/ (mentor Andy Kakkaramadam) -

Ezra and Tahsin are progressing along with RPI Walk as they gave their second talk. Icons are up and the routing algorithm works and handicapped access information is also there. They are using Open Street Map now. (They are also investigating the use of Google Maps). They showed a nice demo.

Theodore and Tommy talked about PokemanRPI. They have adapted Pokeman to RPI campus setting and the dialog uses RPI jargon. They have done the game mechanics, created their own tile editor. Even though much remains, they plan to have a simplified working version by the end of the summer. They also showed a demo.

Courtney and Brandon talked about Kitchen Assistant. They use Django framework, sql and python for development. They are making good progress in their project. Showed a sdemo of the current version. They have implemented a preliminary registration and logging and a database schema. Their system will have a shopping list (units is a problem) recipes and recipe filtering. They have more work left to do - but they hope to have a version by the end of Summer.

Aaron and John gave their second talk on Whiteboard. John is concentrating on the rankings of which home works to be done and when so as to get the best possible GPA for the semester. Aaron is geeting the assignments and start tie working. This is their second talk. They have made great progress. They are currently not doing the section related work. Their talk slides are here http://slides.com/aarongunderson/whiteboard#/

Andy and Stephen talked about the room scheduler project (central place to serve as amap for RPI). They have collected various data and put them in a data base. (mongo db) They are yet to do the front end. Their talk slides can be found here http://prezi.com/1oqqxnmu8mla/roomscheduler/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Ravi and Henry talked about their project RPIHub. Their idea is to collect research projects from various faculty members so that searching for a URP is much simpler. They are doing it as a webservice. They have done preliminary implementation. They hope to complete their project before the end of summer.

All our talks are online at http://youtube.com/rcosrpi1

As usual there were a lot of useful questions and suggestions from the students. That make the whole thing very pleasant and a learning experience. An afternoon well spent.