Week 4 (9/23/2011) Fall 2011

Week 4 (9/23/2011) Fall 2011

The semester is picking up momentum with classes, projects, exams and RCOS. Students are doing a fantastic job. We have a standing room only during our Friday meetings. It is always a pleasure to see so many eager and attentive students.

We had four talks this week.

1) Brandon Justin, Austin Wagner, Alexander Shulgach, Umesh Jonnalagadda
:Mobile Shuttle Tracker
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mobile-shuttle-tracker/

2) Ben Shippee: BitProspector http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bitprospector/

3)Joe Dougherty, Tom Rozansk, Matthhew Heffler: Network Management System


4) Matt Arsenault '11 and current graduate student at RPI (in Physics) on Open Source and me

Umesh and Alex gave a presentation (Brendon and Austin did not want to crowd the stage!) about their Shuttle Tracker (continued from last semester) project. They are joining hands with the webtech group - having a common code base (so changing to Ruby on Rails) and improving some algorithms. They have a very good schedule planned. Looking forward to great things from them. Here is their presentation slides

Mobile shuttle tracker_fall_2011_first_present

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Ben talked about his bitProspector (An open source Python/Django application to monitor Bitcoin mining and exchanges.) Ben writes that his work is based on Bitcoin project and to visit http://www.weusecoins.com/ as the introduction video explains the concept nicely. Implementation language will be Python and uses Django.

Joe D, Matt H and Tom R talked about their new project on managing networks Their proposed software will scale up nicely and their open source software also fills a niche in that area. Their presentation did not give much technical details.

Matt Arsenault gave an inspiring talk based on his involvement with open source software. Matt gave a lot of pointers how to get involved and how to stay involved and how to contribute to Open Source. Here are his presentation slides.

Rcos presentation 9-23-2011

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Yet another delightful week!

Videos of Talks (second and third weeks) Fall 2011

Micheal O'Keefe has been videoptaping our talks and has uploaded the talks at our youtube channel. Please check out http://www.youtube.com/rcosrpi1

Second week talk videos:

Joe Dougherty - mentoring



Priti Kumar (UPE) on ROCS



Peter Hajas on Presentations



Third Week Talks

Ben Shippee on Observatory



John Luther (Google) on Web M
Part 1


Part 2



Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Mike Horowitz on RPI Directory

Week 3 (9/16/2011) Fall 2011

Week 3 (9/16/2011) Fall 2011




We have the official beginning of Fall RCOS projects - students have selected their projects and they have already started working on it - by looking at the observatory and green smileys! (I have to be honest and I am distressed that a few groups have not entered their projects and many entered projects are still red - I do hope that that things will change for the better - an eternal optimist I am!)

This week we had three talks.

1) Ben Shippee on Observatory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/observatory/

2) John Luther (google) on WebM http://www.webmproject.org/

3) Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball and Michael Horowitz o Directory App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Ben gave an introduction to Observatory and some of its features. Already many have placed their projects. Hope others will follow their footsteps.

John gave an overview of the features of webM (from WebM's webpage:
"WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web. WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec.") and many open source projects available with WebM. His talk was well received and many interesting questions followed. To top it off, John gave free T-Shirts to all students.

Christian, Dan and Mike (in spirit) gave an interesting talk on Directory project. They use Google apps, python and django. They also have a nice caching in the backend. They had built a prototype and they showed an excellent demo. A lot of questions and suggestions followed. They are on a fast track (and already number one on the dashboard).

A chilly Friday was warmed up by great talks.

Week 2 - Fall Semester - 9/9/2011

Week 2 9/9/2011



Sean O’Sullivan ’85 (Donor of RCOS) Named Entrepreneur of the Year
http://www.rpi.edu/about/inside/issue/v5n13/osullivan.html
Congratulations Mr. Sean O'Sullivan


This week we had five speakers

Zachary Alberico
Priti Kumar (UPE)
Joe Dougherty
Peter Hajas
Moorthy

Zach gave a brief talk about his project (he has been doing that with a few RCOS members) on a social network site for dating. Zach mentioned some of the cool features of his system that overcomes the algorithmic approach of other sites. Zach uses the
power of people to find a near perfect match and cleverly uses a revenue generating mechanism. The implementation language is Ruby on Rails. Zach's challenge is to make
others use his system. Zach's project provokes interesting questions and discussions.

Priti(UPE) talked about ROCS project (online course scheduling project) and possible projects (including project lead and User Interface portion). This is a great opportunity for some RCOS members to undertake.

Joe requested some of the members to take part in the mentoring role. Mentoring has been very effective in past semesters. I find one learns and does best by following/listening to the advise of their friends and peers. Hope we get some volunteers. Thanks to Mike O'K for taking the video.

Peter gave a scintillating talk on how to make an effective presentation. Peter makes his presentation a dialog between him and the audience. Peter also outlined etiquette
for both the presenters (no bullet, no list, more pictures) and for the audience (no laptop, no cell phone, paying full attention).

Moorthy (that is me) extolled the virtues of writing weekly blogs, having time lines, task lists and pushing code early and often.

What a fantastic way to spend a late evening in the midst of bright and eager students!

Week 1 Fall 2011 (9/2/2011)

Week 1 Fall 2011 (9/2/2011)



Our Fall semester has started with a bang for RCOS. There has been a lot of enthusiasm among students to participate and write open source code. At the same time, a few get intimidated by the past RCOS students and their accomplishments. It is my duty to encourage these students and mentor and guide them gently.



This week we had two talks.

1. Prof. Ben Chang (GSAS and Arts Department - RPI)
2. Mr. Ken Zalewski '89 '91 and Mr. Graylin Kim '11

Ben gave a fantastic tour de force of his research - on games, art and immerse art with videos and his slides. Please look at his website Ben Chang for a lot of his work. His main comment was that open source software is needed for artists - for longevity of the art, the custom software is too expensive, there is no vendor lock in. Ben practices what he preaches. Ben did mention the software development overhead associated with developing open source software. Ben suggested some tools that some of RCOS students can develop.

Ken Zalewki talked about he open source initiatives in NY State Senate and Assembly. They use a lot of open source tools and also contribute back. Main goals of their efforts are to make government transparent, efficient and useful to constituents and elected officials. NY Senate website runs using Drupal 7 which in turn enables the elected officials (trivia information - NY State has 62 senators) and their offices to make easy changes to their websites. Ken's group (part of dotCIO office) also encourages elected officials to maintain facebook, twitter and other social media. This enables the constituents to contact them for expressing their concerns (Ken mentioned about the recent marriage equality bill and the volume of messages). Some of the open source software they use include Linux, as well as Apache, PHP, Java, MySQL, Lucene/SOLR, Drupal, CiviCRM, and Squid.
For more information, please look at http://www.nysenate.gov/open. Their source code repository is in https://github.com/nysenatecio
Graylin who currently works at NY state CIO, started to work on their projects as his RCOS project. He now works there. This is yet another instance of RCOS contributing to the economic well being of NY State!

We are off to a great start and hope the momentum keeps going.

Week 12 (8/12/2011) Summer 2011

Week 12 (8/12/2011) Summer 2011

This is our last week of our summer session. We had a good group of students (including quite a few new students) participate in RCOS and contribute to the open source software efforts. We had two guest speakers (Eric Ameres and Kanai Junichi) and one student (Nicholas Pachulski) presentation. (This time, like last Spring semester, each group gave two talks).

Our speakers are:

1) Eric Ameres - EMPAC

2) Dr Kanai Junichi - MDL

3)Nicholas Pachulski - Koala http://rcos.rpi​.edu/projects/k​oala/

Eric talked about how he joined EMPAC and about his previous experience at ON2 technology (acquired by google Please press here for details). Most of his talk centred around visualization (open source software). This software was devloped by Marc Downie (MIT Media Labs Ph D and Cambridge University Undergraduate). This osftwrae group have NSF funding along with EMPAC and Tetherless world. A lot of coll visualizations and cool new projects are waiting to be done (Future RCOSers please note!)

Eric's talk video may be found below.





Kanai gave a very good presentation on capstone projects for Engineering students at MDL. Most of these projects are sponsored by Companies. So they have to be carefulw hen students working on these projects want their code to be open source. Kanai also mentioned their bugtracking system, documentation and code maintenance. They have given a lot of thought to mentoring, how to break a large project into managebale portions and how to convertthis into a 3 credit course. Kanaki also emphasized the communication and co-operation among group members. Student groups have to submit a rapid protype in 7 or 8 weeks (to get feedback from the mentors) and then improve their design and code during the remianing seven weeks. They educate around 200 students per semester. His talk video is found here.






Finally Nicholas talke about his progress in the back end of Koala System. Nicholas has mastered Ruby on Rails and Git. He also showed a little demo of his system. Colin Kuebler who started Koala is very happy with Nick's back end and Colin plans to integrate his Javascript front end to Nicholas' back end. Nicholas's talk slides are here.

Rcos presentation

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Nicholas's talk video is here.




The summer session went off very well. The students did their work and I enjoyed listening to them as wel as to the guest speakers.

11th week (8/5/2011) Summer 2011

11th week (8/5/2011) Summer 2011

We (the students and instructors) had an excellent opportunity to listen to wonderful talks by distinguished guests. Two presentations by two student groups is also awesome.

Guest Speakers:
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif

Dr. Derek Bruening - (Google) - DynamoRIO

Trishan.deLanerolle - (HFOSS) - Supply And Distribution using Android in Haiti

Dr. Jim Myers (CCNI) - Research Initiatives in CCNI

Student Speakers

Peter Wakefield, Anthony Onwuasoanya - Auto Scheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/autoscheduler/

Dina Jacobsen - IdeaBank htttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ideabank/


Derek(MIT Ph D and currently at Google) gave a Tour De Force on the conception and implementation of DynamoRIO - How he developed a fast software which will enable run time debugging - both for security and for debugging and performance/. Derek (currently at Google) has released his software as open source. He has many exciting projects for RCOS students. Please look at Derek's slides here:

Dynamorio rpioss-aug2011

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Video of his talk may be seen here.





Trishan (Trinty College and HFOSS Director) gave a scintillating talk on the HFOSS trip to Haiti to deploy their mobile software. Trishan discussed technical challenges, deployment challenges and Human factor Issues. His talk was an eye opener how dedicated
group of software developers can make an impact on social and humanitarian causes. Video of his talk may be found here.






Jim (CCNI and previously at Pacific North West Super Computing facility) gave an overview of the many new and exciting research activities at Rensselaer. He also talked about the recent NSF proposal. Jim has coordinated with a number of state of the art researchers and integrated into a coherent proposal. Video of his talk may be found here.



Peter and Anthony gave their update talk on Automatic Scheduler (a FireFox plugin). Their system consist of three parts: Data Base Backend, Scheduling and User Interface.
Peter and Anthony's slides may be found here. They have implemented a simple scheduling algorithm. Their demo of their software is pretty nice. Peter and Anthony are planning to modularize their system and implement an advanced scheduling algorithm before releasing their software. Peter's talk slides may be found here.

Auto scheduler presentation_2

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Peter's video may be found here:




Dina has learned a lot of programming skills to her design skills. She designed the over- all system and had a few iterations to improve. She has coded most of it. The data base and the user interface is complete The search also works Adding to data base and different visualizations have yet to be implemented.

Dina's talk slides may found here.

Second presentation idea_bank

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Video fo Dina's talk may be found here