We made too many wrong mistakes - YB

Week 8 (3/26/2010)

"We made too many wrong mistakes!" was a quote from Yogi Bera - Looks like it is applicable to me. (from the manner I have to answer various questions regarding what I have been doing). We are going on a stretch run with half of the semester is over. This week is the beginning of second round of talks. We had four talks this week.

1) Ben Boeckel, Joe Werther and Rob Escriva

2) John McMaster

3) Android group (Zachary Alberico, Brendan Ashby,Baran Bagcilar,Matthew Gerrior, Lindsey Kennard, Maria Montenegro, Zhenzheng Zhou)

4) Brain Zaik (Web tech Group)

All the groups are updating their blog and code base in Dashboard.

Ben, Joe and Rob's work on CHASM has been going strong - they have their own dash board and build and unit tests. That group says they lost time in getting their unit tests in order - To me, they seem to be doing great. I have to look at their code and dashboard and educate myself - learn a few tricks and tips.

John continues to be our embedded system expert. He has refined his goal and his plan to make a universal decompiler for static library seems plausible (given the expertise of John). John has also taken some time to deal with various copy right and licencing issues.

Android group learned a lot of new things this semester - git, java, android simulator. Since they have a large group, they have added communication overhead. They have more modest goals now - Their presentation provoked anumber of questions and helpful suggestions.

Brian gave his experiences with open source software in a historical and philosophical perspective. He also provided a number of helpful suggestions about how to promote open source software. (Brian and the web tech group has been very successful with designing, developing and promoting Concerto, RPITV streaming media and Flagship).

UPE, ACM and RCOS is running a programming competition this Saturday (3/27/2010). Rob, Ryan, Ben and Evan are some of the leaders with a a lot of volunteers helping them in this excellent undertaking.

Delightful Talks to welcome Spring

Week 7: (3/19/2010)

After the spring break, students in rcos have come back with a lot of energy and enthusiasm. A few announcements:

Allen Lavoie did a poster presentation in Computer Science Department on 3/19/2010. Allen's preliminary results are turning a few heads. Allen did a blog post here where you can see his poster.

Joe, Matt and Brian's votebox has reached the finals of the RPI elevator Pitch competition. I am very glad to see Anna has also reached the finals of the competition for her Interactive Tutorial work . Two out of fifteen finalists is quite good as rcos students represent much less than 14 percentage of undergraduate students at RPI. So a big round of applause for all your achievements.

RPISEC is participating at RIT this week. At least three current members and two past members of rcos are participating in this competition. With their track record, there is no doubt in my mind that they will do well. More details about this will be announced next week.

This week, we had six speakers:

1, Priti and Aileen.
2. Eric and Mike.
3. Brian Michalski (WebTech Group).
4. Peter, Jimmy and Bryan.
5. Tianhe.
6. Moorthy.

To know the details of a students' project, please take a look at the dashboard.

Priti and Aileen have been making good progress with a lightbulb project - though they miss the presence of Peter and the hardware. There have been a number of questions, suggestions and volunteers to help with their project. There are a lot of useful and humanitarian applications to this project.

Eric and Mike have showed interesting and useful things that can be done with two $50 TI watches. They have a working gesture recognition software and demonstrated an application of accelerometer software. Their talk and demo were excellent. They have posted their talk slides here (Hint to others: Please post your talk slides in your blog - I really liked all of your talks and I need time to digest - so I can re-read your slides).

Brian Michalski worked with rcos for a couple of semesters. His contribution to rcos and knowledge
of software development is second to none. Brian is currently working on Flagship (a student government document management system). Flagship is written in Ruby and according to Brian even RPI students (who were accused to be apathetic to student government) are using Flagship software!

Peter, Bryan and Jimmy working on Next Generation Notifier System gave a down to earth talk. They are coding in Perl. This group had a nice demo and talk. They have been updating their blogs, code etc. They have steadily climbed the dashboard ladder!

Tianhe is a rcos student who is participating for the experience. Tianhe, working with Prof. Piper, has been making contribution to Sage, an open source software for doing symbolic and algebraic Mathematics. Tianhe has done some performance tests and he plans to contribute library packages to Sage.


Finally I talked about wearing many hats - (work like a rcos student on a project and personally enjoy triumphs and tribulations!, represent rcos students to the external world (usually outside people are very impressed with the work - at least that is what they tell me), and adviser to rcos students).

I do understand it is easier for me to preach than to practice - But together (you and me) can achieve great things for open source software and rcos.

My slides can be found here:

Week 6 i (not real but imaginary! - Finding my own Roots - Please take a look at this blog for a Mathematical Exposition on Finding Your roots)

Week 6 i (Spring Break 3/10/2010)

Thanks to Luis Ibanez of Kitware, who suggested that I attend,participate and contribute to HFOSS ( http://www.hfoss.org ) - Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (hence the acronym HFOSS) workshop held in conjunction with SIGCSE (http://www.sigcse.org/sigcse2010/ ACM Computer Science Education Conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin for year 2010). This was a delightful experience for me. Going to Milwaukee during a spring break from Troy may not be that enticing, but attending and participating in this workshop was a fantastic experience. I found a lot of kindred people sharing the same goal of developing (or help students develop) open source software for humanitarian purposes. In that sense, I found my roots!

HFOSS is organized by people from Trinity College (Hartford CT), Wesleyen University, ( Middletown CT) and Connecticut College (New London CT). The workshop was supported by NSF, Google and ACM. There was a good turnout for this workshop. I join Greg (redhat) in saying woohoo!

The workshop program can be found here

The format was that we had a key note speaker, a panel discussion and a breakout session followed by summary. There was a lot of twittering activity going on during the workshop. Please take a look at this to get a feel of what was going on during the workshop.

Hal Abelson (MIT and Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) author) was the key note speaker.




Here are the notes from Greg (copied from his twitter feed and reversed and edited by me)

university curriculum changes one grave at a time

usc's *purpose* is to promote and foster the creation of intellectual property." Source: usc dean.

our *responsibility* as cs academics to resist the intelectual property stampede

open infrastructure is key

keeping cs open is vital because it's the instrumentality for everything else

dspace @ mit, institutional research archive sharing

the conflict between free expression and ip at universities is growing

general counsel of UT notes that taking notes implies a personal use license to create derivative works

read Ms. McSherry(Stanford Law School, currently at FSF), "who owns academic work?"

we are, right now, determining the future of knowledge in the information age.

academic authors give their papers to journals, who then own all rights to it forever.

university libraries are prohibited by licensing agreements to mine data from journals.

endgame of scientific publishing industry: monopolistic control by elsevier

generative platform! Read Zittrain (Harvard Law Professor and currently at Oxford) "the future of the internet"

for all microsoft woes, you need no permission to write and share pc software. The same is not true for iphone/ipad

are we instilling the values of "tinkerability" in our students?

will the mobile infrastructure be tinkerable?

working on the google app inventor to keep mobile platforms tinkerable.

google app inventor looks suspiciously like scratch - It is in fact scratch.

imagine a tenure committee that demands urls for open publications

I participated in the panel discussion along with people from RedHat, Google, RIT, Sahana foundation (an open source disaster management system ) and a number of educational institutes.



Industries complained about lack of knowledge of Faculty members on open source software and practice; Educational Institutes complained about lack of speed of assimilating open source software in their curriculum; Every one complained about lack of diversity and K-12 educational system. There was a lively discussion afterwards.

My job was simple. I just spoke about the outstanding work and projects done by students. I think people are impressed with all the projects (number, quality) and the dashboard to boot.

Here are my slides (I was not allowed to use slides - I used them as guidelines for my brief position statement)

Rcos Hfoss

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

During lunch, enthusiastic and energetic students and faculty members (from Wesleyen, Connecticut college, Trinity College, Oregon State University, North Carolina State University) gave poster presentations. They answered all questions and showed their passion for HFOSS. I wish that I had the resources to bring our students to this workshop and show off their projects (may be next year!)


After lunch, we had three breakout sessions:

A. Curriculum: A Certificate Program (Allen Tucker)

B. Community Building: HFOSS Chapters (Ralph Morelli)

C. Town and Gown Collaborations (Leslie Hawthorn)

I participated in Community Building and Town and Gown Collaborations (as we are allowed to participate in at most two out of three). RCOS is already doing (or attempting to do) this. We need support from every level - more faculty member participation, a kinder administration and cooperation from city, state and federal governments. These are not easy to come by - We have to keep trying and make our efforts sincere - some day things will change.

It will be nice to have HFOSS chapter here at RPI and RCOS be a part of it. Hope that happens sooner than later.

All in all, it was useful (I met a number of people, learned about new projects, made people aware of our projects and RCOS).

A lot of photos are taken during the workshop - As soon as I get a link to them I will post.

Another Set of wonderful Talks

Week 6: (3/5/2010)

Rob, Eric and Nate have updated Spring 2010 projects and its current website is http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu - The Dashboard has been keeping us honest and sincere. Dashboard is also used as a recruiting tool by a few companies! There is a great deal of co-ordination between all the mentors (Rob, Eric and Josh). Nate is helping with a consistent web site using good style sheets.

Students are receiving a lot of accolades for their innovations and it is hard for me to keep up with all that! Please do send me mails/notes about your software (how many downloads, any press/blog notices) and I will post them in Achievements section.

The past week we had six fine talks by the following students:

1) Justin Lipton and Jonathan Rosenberg
2) Allen Lavoie
3) Graylin Kim and Cihan Caglayan
4) Anna Cyganowski
5) Brendon Justin
6) Timothy McMullan and Tom Rozanski

They have been updating their blogs which is reflected in the dashboard

Justin and Jonathan are making good progress with their Medialist which has a nice social networking idea. Their system is (very) cool.

Allen Lavoie got excellent initial results on his automatic paper classification. He had selected nice features and the initial results are very promising.
Here are Allen's beautiful slides.

Algorithmic Detection Of Computer Generated Pa

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Graylin and Cihan are working on Floodlight to make NY State government transparent. This project is done jointly with DotCIO from NY State.

Anna, a first time RCOSer, did a fantastic presentation of MateriaLab, an educational game designed for integrated Material Science Education.

Brendon, a first time RCOSer, is planning to contribute patches, improvements and bug fixes to existing open source software synergy++ (a popular mouse grabbing software between desktop and laptops). Brendon has already done some patches!

Timothy and Tim, also first time RCOSers, are working on AWESOME-wav to do open source steganography with wave files. They have an intial design and are planning for advances/improvements once their initial implementation is completed.

There were plenty of perceptive questions and suggestions from other students. The speakers were able to give appropriate answers/counter comments. I learned as much from these interactions as I listened from the student talks.

Students are planning to code open source projects while spending their spring break away from classes! - At least that is what they tell me!

Full Moon(ides)/Full Talks Week

Week 5: (2/24/2010) and (2/26/2010)

What a wonderful week with talks and a full moon to cap on Saturday of this week. In India, it is spring time and a colorful festival Holi is celebrated on Fullmoon day.

On Wedensday (2/24), we had a talk by FSF guru Mr. Richard Stallman on Copyright Vs Community. The talk started late at 8:45 pm (instead of at 8:00 pm) due to a travel delay (We had a big snow storm that day and many schools were closed on that day - of course RPI is open no matter what). Despite the fact, it started late, we had a good turnout of students and visitors.



This topic of copyright is of interest to most of the students interested in developing free and open source software. After enumerating the existing problems, Mr. Stallman provided his solutions to copyright problems and provided convincing arguments (at least he convinced me then). Copyright laws are originally intended to enable creativity to enrich the society. In the process, the laws changed to help big corporations and not artists and programmers. Mr. Stallman's solutions are intended to rectify this and who does not want this? There were many interesting questions (such How to collect and allocate money to artists depending on their talents and popularity) and discussions. We had a nice audio support from RPI media services (That person stayed through the talk and even asked a RPITV crew, last years talk of RMS was one of the most watched ones at RPI). Tim Horton (RCOS participant) took pictures. As the topic indicates, the whole effort is community based. We owe a big thanks to Luis Ibanez (of Kitware) for organizing the talk, Rob Escriva (RCOS mentor) for co-ordinating the student volunteers and help in numerous ways, Peter Healy and Bryan Yudkin (RCOS participants) for transportation help and finally to Jason Sanchez (RPICS graduate student) and Andrew Zonenberg (RPISEC) for some crucial conversational help. Thanks are also to the following people who work behind the scenes: Prof. Badri Roysam, Ms. Laraine Michaelides, Dean Prabhat Hajela and Ms. Kimberly Ellenwood. We profusely thank Mr. Sean O'Sullivan who make these talks happen by his generous donation.

2/26/2010 Friday Talks:
We have six students group talks on Friday
1) Sean Austin, Diana Mazzola, Grifin Milsap, Richmund Fries on DroidViz
2) Tim Horton on Contacts Lists for Gnome
3) Corey McClymonds and Patrick Stetter on Music Database Tools
4) John McMaster on universal decompiler
5) Joe Chrzanowski on Was PHP framework
6) Josh Elser on RPInventory

All the talks are wonderful. These projects are all better described here.

Droidviz provides the first open source visualization toolkit and API for Androids - they plan to make a plasma pong for Android to test their API.

Tim Horton (Seed Fame) is beginning to make a final push for his contact lists.

Corey and Patrick (First time RCOS participants) are doing a great job - They even had a live demo during first presentation. Their talk is on lines at dashboard. They are going to provide a toolkit to manage your music cds.

John McMaster (our resident embedded system expert) gave a fabulous summary of his decompiler project. Many RCOS participants will welcome such a decompiler for their own projects and work.

Joe gave a detailed presentation of his WAX PHP framework. Joe has already done a lot of work. It is a matter of days before Joe releases his first version of code. Joe's first RCOS project offcampus rental has been utilized a great deal this semester (with the change in adminidtartion's policy of residence requirements). His project was also mentioned in op-ed page in poly (2/17/2010). (His project page acknowledges RCOS!)

Josh Elser (RCOS's gentle mentor) gave a historical perspective of RPInventory - He gave a nice summary of the challenges faced by an open source project and how to overcome them. His software started in Fall of 2008 and is still going strong with a number of clubs adapting his software. Josh is improvinag his system so that many more clubs and universities and colleges adapt his system. Josh also talked about the new undergrdauate labortatories (including space for RCOS) intiative in CS department
Here are his slides.

RPInventory 2-25-2010

View more presentations from je2451.

Josh's blog post is here.

Looking forward to great talks in weeks to come.

Big Red (Really RCOS) Freak-out Week

Week 4: (2/19/2010)

This week is a big red freak-out at RPI - We have a big hockey game during the weekend and the school spirit is high. On the other hand school and software spirit is always high at RCOS. RCOS is all about students and open source software - It is for them, by them and for them. My job as a co-director is just to enable them to reach greater heights and not to be a hindrance to them.

This week we had five great talks:

1. Devin Ross
2. Joseph Dougherty and their group
3. Nate Stedman
4. Rob Carr and Amy W
5. Matt Arsenault

Devin Ross talked about Iphone Applications and his tapku library. His work has already been noticed with downloads, followers. Now adding another feather to his cap, his library software details may appear in the forthcoming book - stay tuned.

Joe and his group are working on Votebox. They have the hardware donated tothem from various companies. They are planning to redesign their software in C++ with a Java front end. We hope that their system will be ready for Freshmen elections this Fall (and may be 2010 presidential elections too!)

Nate and Rob's group (wizards of gnome and seed fame) are designing two different versions of presentations software for Gnome Desktop (Openoffice presentation sucks - according to Nate!). Nate already had a sleek demo and it is very impressive. Rob's group is designing the system bottom up and many of the subsytems are in place. Nate's implementation language is Vala.

Matt is building clutter bindings for Haskell and he has released his version clutterhs0.1 - This semester he wants to improve adding more fancy applications and release clutterhs0.2 Before the semester is over Matt hopes to release clutterhs1.0 Matt is writing in Haskell and it is good to have some pure functional people in the group.

Students are developing software, using the state of art technology tools and pushing the technology further. After listening to these talks and other students' perceptive questions and comments, my understanding of computer science keeps improving. Thanks!

The mentors are doing a wondeful work. Eric's dashboard, Rob deploying planet blog aggregator (and donating his machines, rack and being sysadmin and more) and Josh's genle prodding help the center a long way. Ms. Duffy wrote a
nice blog about her visit and talk at RCOS.

It is an open invitation to other people to get involved in RCOS - be a mentor, developer, donor(!) to RCOS. We welcome you with your creative input and suggestions. It is up to you to step up the plate and play ball! (Spring is almost here and my baseball metaphors are all over!)

First Three Weeks at RCOS

Spring Semester 2010

Time flies and when you get sick work load drags you down. How do you fly when your body gets dragged down by sickness - That is what happened to me at the beginning of the Spring Semester 2010. Any way I decided to fly with the students who are soaring high! Thanks to Sean O'Sullivan class of 1985 for his generous donation for enabling the students and faculty members to soar high in Open Source Software World.

Week 1: (1/29/2010)

We have a very good group of students interested in doing varied Open Source Projects. Hope their interests sustain through out the semester. We want to hear great accomplishments by the students. Students are still settling down with their projects and finding group partners. Android applications development seem to be a big favorite among students this semester.

For the first week we had two invited guests - Dean Hill from NY State Senate about NY State DotCIO intiatives to make Government proceedings transparent with open source software. His talk slides can be found in

Ny Senate Open Source Initiatives

View more presentations from NY Senate.

The second talk is by Jon Chen on his software development graduate applications review system for the Computer Science Department at Rensselaer.

Gradapp Talk by Jon Chen on 1/29/2010

View more presentations from mskmoorthy.

Week 2: (2/5/2010)

We had a fine talk by Ms. Duffy class of 2003 on How to Get involved in an Open Source Operating System. Ms. Duffy works at Red Hat and she works on HCI related problem. Her talk slides may be found here. We had a packed audience listening intently. If you do not believe me, please look at the photos her colleague took during her talk here. Ms. Duffy wants to see a number of RPI students apply for internship position at Fedora/RedHat. The internship description may be found here.

Week 3: (2/12/2010)

We have a group of seniors who volunteered to mentor the studens on the need basis. These fine group of students (Rob, Josh, Eric, Devin, Ben, Tim to name a few ) not only produce good code/software, maintain some of the infrastructure (both hardware and software) also help out mentoring. Thanks guys. This week we have talks by the following four students (and their respective groups)

1. Rob Escriva
2. Eric Allen
3. Allen Lavoie
4. Zach and his group.

Zach's group consists of sophomore students and they are implementing a grade tracking (grade tracking is a popular hobby for students at RPI - The folklore is that the students have developed optimization algorithms in computing how much effort is needed to get the grade he/she wants!) for Andorid. We are hoping such a software will benefit the students, tip the faculty members to be more vigilant about slackers (Benefit to the faculty members come only because the software is open source!)



There has been a variety of good news -

1) Yongqian Li , (as a first semester Freshmen) a Fall 2008 project participant of RCOS, created a Firefox extension called FastestFox
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9825). It
is quite popular, with several million users. It has also been covered
in the media, with reviews on CNet, Lifehacker, and other, smaller,
blogs. It is also profitable, mostly from ads, to Li (who is in the Bay area
on leave from RPI)

Press coverage:

• cnet
• Life Hacker

Congratulation to Li (whose 2008 Fall project was about mining wikipedia

2) Computer Science Department is trying to provide laboratory space for RCOS students. Every one is working hard to make this a reality soon.

Links:

1. RCOS website
2. Blog Aggregator
3. Dashboard (Hot off the Press: we have 76% coverage of Spring Projects)