Week 7 (9/30/2014) and (10/3/2014) Fall Semester

We are at the half way point of our fall semester.   So many things are happening at RPI. Rensselaer magazine had a story about RCOS in the Fall 0214 issue (see the online version here )Things have been progressing along well. We had two meetings. http://hack.rpi.edu/ has been open for registartion.

On Tuesday (9/30/2014) we had these presentations

1) Robert Rouhani - Protips
2)  Daniel Baek  - PEP8: Python Coding Style

3) Peter Ryder, Blake Lingenau, Mike Macelletti - Check Up
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/check-up/ (mentor Devon Bernard)

4) Rob, Vijay, Ylonka, Jacob, Josh, Chandrika - EMTags
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/emtags/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

5) Brian, John, Zachary, Aleksey -  Where R U?
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/where-r-u/ (mentor Jim Boulter)

6) Alex White, Joseph Eduardo - Command Chain
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/command-chain/ (mentor Eric Oswald)

7) Dimitar Dimitrov and David Kim - Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/ (menotr Dimitar Dimitrov - self mentored?)

Lead mentor gave a nice presentation called ProTips - how to make RCOS expereience. His talk slides may be found here http://slides.com/robertrouhani/rcos-protips#/

Python coding style was presented -by Daniel. His talk slides may be found here http://www.slideshare.net/hydroArgentum/pep-8-python-coding-style

Checkup is a windows process monitor - improves what perfromance monitor task manager does - finer time intervals.
Their presentation is here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G_v-GhdKZpaGrXo2mMMVH6XU7r6-YqWNAImennmTO7Y/edit  - Very fine talk and work. As usual a number of interesting questions were posed and answers were very illuminating.

EMTags is a project to help emergency situations. Instead of paper, they want to have electronic tags. Their talk may be found here https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=A4143B7E9F94CF58!65125&authkey=!AM9-pD53v9BK_PA&ithint=file%2cpptx

Whereare U is a mobile application for ride organizer with GPS and Map integration. It is better than a facebook group (answer to a question) Their talk slides may be found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1rj39cVEMqbPKgDkt3YgT-SxPZYCRHCBzQpJsJIdszHI/edit#slide=id.p

Command Chain is a system to allow the requirements, deadlines and other notfications acceptable to a chain of commands. It is meant as a stand alone system,

Pierce Logic has progressed to a state whre it is close to release. Now they are working to port it to touch sensitive screens, Their talk slides may be found here (Oh! Oh!! Dimitar did not send in his lovely slides)

On Friday (10/3/2014) we had these presentations

1) Laurie Wu Robotics hand, Open Hand Model T42
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-hand-model-t42/  (mentor Devon
Bernard)  - No Blog posts?

2) Sebastian Sarbora, Jazmine Ollinger, Veronica, Dan, Charlotte -
Neptune http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/neptune/ (mentor Joshua Makinen)
- last three names do not appear in Observatory

3) Theodore Tenedorio, Tommy Fang - Pokemon RPI
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/pokemon-rpi/ (mentor Jim Boulter)

Open Hand Project was a fantastic project and very well presented  This project is to build an open source hand (designed at HHarvard)There was veen a youtube video. Her talk slides may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dMUVrdHBYOFNsMjdka3BSbFlFdUJ0am9HLXJZ/view?usp=sharing 

Underwater Robotics is an open source effort to make a project and make it inexpensive. It also has a n added feature of wireless communication. Their talk slides may found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1TtipVGssuieGE7SN4Wmnz4KPIIUVUAZY_VudGJOsrO4/edit?usp=sharing 

Pokemon RPI is an ongoing project the pokeman with RPI as map. They are progressing along well with an expected release at the end of Spring Semester. Their talk slides may be found here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2UFEZRUC23dNWVOdWQwQmVTYkZzZzVpTkNJWThwYXllOThV/view?usp=sharing

All the talks were fantastic and I learned a lot by attending these talks.

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.

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 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 2 Fall 2014 (9/2/2014 and 9/5/2014)

Week 2 Fall 2014 (9/2/2014 and 9/5/2014)

We had two meetings this week. On Tuesday after three more elevator pitch presentations,  students were choosing the projects to work on and the mentors were choosing which projects to mentor Robert and Jorel, lead mentors, co-ordinated the whole effort. Dr. David Goldschmidt talked about which forms to fill and what are the credit restrictions.

On friday we collected the URP applications and the various other forms. We had four presentations.

1. Severin Ibarluzea on Creating packages with atom.io
2. Ezra Dowd and Tahsin Loqman on RPI Walk http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-walk/
3. Justin Etzine & Nick Thomson on pymap - project from NRB Hackathon
4. Jorel Lalicki and Eric Oswald on Adaptable Automative Sensor Log http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/adaptable-automotive-sensor-logger/

Severin gave a demo and talk on his creating packages with atom.io. He showed me a creating a package called misspel using atom.io - using coffeescript - It was very nicely presented. I wish he post his slides.

Ezra and Tahsin talked about RPI Walk their summer project. They made the project for Android, the route planning is working. They even showed a demo. They are planning to release their code at the end of the semester.

Justin Etzine & Nick Thomson talked about their NRB hackathon project on campus python clickable map They were able to create a simple map for rpi (with clickable information about buildings). Their mentors (at NRB) is  a RCOS student. Both these freshmen are planning to work on RCOS projects this semester.

Jorel and Eric talked about their Adaptable Automative sensor. This project is to be used by SAE for their car - logging various sensors data. They havedesigned the chips - They are planning to make an inexpensive (and open) hardware. 

All the talks were well received and there were many interesting questions.

On Saturday, we had Rensselaer Medalists visit RPI. RCOS students (Severin , Aaron and Aesa ) answered  many questions. They gave theor perspective on RCOS and how it augments their RPI Education Their photographs are at the top of this blog. Jorel's kisckstarter kit is providing the illumination.  The bottom two photographs show the attentive medalists and their parents to discussions about RCOS.

Week 1 - Fall 2014 Week of 25th August 2014

First week Fall Semester 2014

Fall semester started with a lot of apprehension. Not much money is left to provide full stipen during this academic year. We have been working hard to raise fund. Till we get mney in hand or some promise, nothing is certain.

On Tuesday we had brief presentations (by Dave Goldschmidt, Lead mentors Jorel and Robert and me). Dave G laid out the facts (current situation of RCOS). I gave a brief hsitory of RCOS My slides may be found here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1tJgDzVwDdBqkpy1IKZOK70WbwVvlUc65yIk-C3Y1d44/edit

on Friday Prof. Stewrat talked about the future vision and plans for RCOS. We are all optimistic for the outlook of RCOS.

Jorel and Robert are the lead mentors for this semester. They talked about the plans for the current semester. They also invited mentors to introduce themselves to the group. Jorel and Robert suggested one minute Elevator pitch slide for all the projects (Robert provided a template).

On Friay we had  35 elevator pitch presentations https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rbOx2KvSlUFBK_uziiRaqlW_UE8u9OQPhhEqEo0YOPQ/edit#gid=0 . They are well presented  and to the point. Each project presentation is for one minute. The slides (for all the projects) may e found here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1nSH-m29z51eoRsTJcJt9jCAgl6roOmgK6N1ztEotgy8/edit?usp=sharing

I am optimistic about the fall semester. We had around 130 students attending Tuesday and Friday meetings. Let us hope for the best.

Week 12 - Last Week (8/5/2014) and (8/7/2014) of Summer 2014

Week 12 - Last Week of Summer 2014

We had a cake to culminate the end of summer session 2014.  We committed many mistakes and we did learn from our mistakes - Hopefully we will not commit the same mistakes again. 

The following groups made presentations.

Tuesday (8/5/2014) (Attendance has been dropping like a ton of bricks)

1)   Qinglong Kong, Nanyu Zeng, Yang Wang, Tianbo Xie - Window Cleaning Robot http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/clear-glass-project/ (mentor Jorel) - 2nd Talk

2) Daniel Baek and Nikil Sunilkumar - OpenIRT http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/openirt/ and Sodexo Menu Parserhttp://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sodexo-menu-parser/  (Mento Daniel) -2nd Talk

3)  Brian Corbin, David Claxton - Brewed  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/brewed/ (ind. project) - Brian's first talk

4)  Adam Susser - Dark Matter Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dark-matter-simulation/ (Mentor Nicholas)

5) - Jim Boulter, Emmett Hitz, & Wyler McAninch-Ruenzi - MeNext  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/menext/ (Mentor Jim) - 2nd Talk

6)  Courtney Lang, Brandon McLear, Kirk Smith - Kitchen Assistant http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kitchen-assistant/ (Mentor Aaron) - 2nd Talk

7)  Andy Kakkaramadam, Stephen Romano - RoomScheduler http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/roomscheduler/ (Mentor Andy) -2nd Talk

8) Huiye Liu, Xitu Chen, Eunkyoung Lee, Peiyang Ding, Yiding Zhang - ShengGuanTu http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sheng-guan-tu/  http://shengguantu.weebly.com/ (Mentor Robert)

9) Matt Fenlon and Yeoni Lee - ILS http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/ils/ (mentor Soraya) - First Talk

10) Avi Weinstein - Asteroids implemented in Scheme/openGL (ind project)

Thursday 8/7/2014 (8 students attended our extra session meeting!)

11)  Avi Weinstock, Alex White, Hayleigh Sanders - Markov-grammatical-inferencer http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/mgi/ (mentor Joe) - 2nd Talk

12) Jorel Lalicki - Hacodex and others (NATPunch) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/hackodex/ (mentoe Nicholas) - 3rd Talk

13) Zexin Wan - open source card game cetner http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/open-source-card-game-center1/ (mentor Jee Woong) - First Talk

14) Terrence Farrel - SpritzReader http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/spritzreader/ (mentor Connor) (by slides and youtube)

Despite my misgivings and misperceptions, most of the students did a creditable project. Wish they had worked harder and completed their projects (or complete their projects before the end of summer) - easier said than done (of course)

What follows is my understanding

Window Cleaning Robot team is in the 3d printing phase of their project.

OpenIRT is still in the design phase. Sodexo Menu parser has difficulty with the day of the menu parsing and spelling errors.

Open Brewary has a preliminary implementation - still some way to go - They are doing their project in IPhone.

Dark matter Simulation found that dynamic fraction may not be the cause of moncerous (/) ring.

MeNext has at least two to three weeks work left to get the two ends talking and to beta test their project.

Room Scheduler hasa lot of data to load and to hand convert into a SVG,

ShengGuanTu has at least three weeks left to get a skeleton of their game working.

Interactive Liquor System had an arduino breakdown. They abandoned their initial implementation in Python - They will be doing it in C or C++ . There was a lvely discussion about adding new features and usefulness of this system.

Asteroid simulation (an independent project) was talked by Avi. he used Scheme and JOGL to implement his system.

Zexin talked about his opensource card framedwork. It still needs considerable work to release an alpha version (written in Java)

Avi, Hayleigh talked MGI (puprose was to learn the programming language OCaml)- Avi did some parser for Natural language like grammar (markov grammar) and display parse tree. He also used Markov Grammar to  generate sentences (depending up on the Markov-ness the sentences made sense or not0. He then showed how to parse those sentences. Hayleigh talked about Qlearning Algorithm to predict the states. Since she could not use Natural Language models, she experimented with Prisoner's dilemna and showed results.

Jorel talked about his projec NatPunch which will facilitate peer to peer gaming without the need of a server. he explained  the theory and his methodology.. He implemented using PHP. His presentation elicited a number of questions from the aprse (but attentive) audience. He then talked about Hacodex. He tried to implement using Django and he  was not satisfied with it (He dislikes programming in Python) and Django may be an overkill for Hacodex.

Terrence sent me slides for SpritzReader as this will be his first talk (and he could not be at RPI because of medical appointments). He had a video of his  demo https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2uVnShx62s_ME9DcjNFSlg2c00/edit?usp=sharing_eil As per his email, " I'm not ready to publish the app yet as I feel it isn't complete, but hope to continue working on it this fall semester, hopefully with a couple of friends."

I was a bbit disappointed mostly with myself - my inability to motivate the students to accomplish what the projects promised. May be I am running out of steam or I am out of touch with reality! Any way a sad state for me to be in :(