Role Reversals!

Week 12: (4/23/2010)

It is no longer the case that once you are always a teacher - In my case it is more true. I am learning so many new and exciting things from students working at RCOS. Students are on top of the leading edge technology and uses them in their projects. More importantly they inform which ones are good, easier to use and perform better.

This week we had three student presentations and two guest presentations.

They are

1) Dr. Travis Desell (Guest - CS Post Doc)

2) Mr. Will Gill (Guest- dotCIO staff)
3) Eric Allen and Michael O'Keefe
4) Allen Lavoie
5) Brendon Justin

Travis talked about his work on on Volunteer Computing and MilkyWay Project. He and his group (professors and students) use the BOINC open software from Berkeley as a middle layer. His group enjoyed an open source contribution to GPU that sped the computation drstically. They have reached a peta flop computation power and has more volunteers than SETI project.
Recently he and another group has started dnaathome a new volunteer computing project.

Will talked about enhancement to his last semesters (RCOS) project (as an independent study course). Will has developed a Facebook Applications on Event Mashup Maps on Facebook. He has a prototype implementation. He was all set to give a demo - unfortunately Facebook changed their API last Monday (4/19) and hence could not give a demo. Never the less, Will showed a detailed design and implemetation plan to develop a facebook application.

For the students presentation, dashboard http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu/groups/dashboard/1 gives a better justification of their progress.

Eric amd Mike gave a fantastic presentation of their gesture recognition software that work on wrist watches. They gave a nice demo that recognized a circle gesture. Their system uses Java GUI in the front end and a ruby backend. They worked magic. I am eagerly waiting to see what they are going to show in their final demo - will it be air math, or remote slide turner, or some thing else - Stay tuned!

Allen has given a yet another fantastic presntation on his automatic paper classification. He is doing detailed experiments to make his findings on a sound footing. His talk slides (from his blog) can be found here

Brendon has been doing what an open source developed should do - reporting bugs, providing patches to an existing open source project synergy-plus. Brendon's next step is to develop a GUI using QT and I am looking forward to seeing his final demo.

Next Tuesday (4/27) is undergraduate research symposium where five rcos students (and one former rcos student) are participating. Good Luck to all those students.

Speeding Forward

Week 11: (4/16/2010)

Five current RCOS students will be presenting in RPI's first Undergraduate Symposium They are
1) Eric Allen
2) Ben Boeckel, Rob Escriva and Joe Werther
3) Allen lavoie
4) John McMaster
5) Devin Ross.

The presentations/posters are on April 27th from 2:00 pm to 6:00 pm in DCC (Posters) and CII (Presentations). Congratulations and Good Luck to these students. Besides these five, past RCOS student Alex Radocea and RPISEC club member Andrew Zonenberg will also be presenting on the research symposium. These seven students are among a select group of undergraduate student (RPI) presenters on the symposium.

Final Poster presentation for RCOS Projects will be on May 7th (from 10 am to 5:00 pm) in DCC Great Hall. Please start preparing/thinking about your posters.

We had six excellent talks by thefollowing students/groups.

1) Graylin Kim and Cihan Caglayan
2) Nate Stedman
3) Tim Horton
4) Matt Arsenault
5) Josh Elser
6) Corey McClymonds and Patrick Stetter

As usual, dashboard http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu/groups/dashboard/1 has the latest update on their projects.

Graylin and Cihan are overcoming the challenges of communication problems, jargons, obsure documents on their work with the NY State office of open legislative efforst. They are working with django, github and making a slow but steady progress in their Fllodlight work. Their communications, documents are in floodlight site.

Nate gave a fine presentation on Ease, his gnome slide presentation tool. It was written on top of Gnome, GTK toolkit and written in Lava. It has many interesting features and can easily include video embedding utilizing Gnome's library support. Nate's demo of his system went without a flaw. Nate may be producing a video (youtube) of Seed for a wider audience. importantly, his project was selected as one GSOC project and a student from France (Steafn?) may be developing with Nate on Ease as Stefan's GSOC project. This is a fantastic news to Seed, Nate and RCOS.

Tim's contatct list program has come a long way. His system has two backends for gmail and Thuuderbird. During his implementation process, Tim ditat discovered bugs in Vala compiler and libgdata. These by themselves are a big contribution to Open Source Community. Tim showed a demo of the current version of his system. It was a quite an impressive system.

Matt's implementation of clutter in Haskel has been released. That system has a few followers. Matt continues to test his implementation besides doing a lot of bug fixes/patches in the original clutter implementation.

Josh presented and showed a demo of his current version of RPInventory His latest contribution is to add dynamic fields (with data type integer or string). This added feature will make RPInventory more attractive to a larger number of users.

Corey and Patrick's uctui a collection tool user interface for media libraries. They use two backends for their music library collections. They have a command line interface working. They are planning to have a GUI tool for easy interaction to their tool and their backend libraries.
I will like to end with a quote from Corey and Patrick's blog.
Thank you open source. Who said code isn't valuable just for reading :)

That statement alone made my day! (This is what RCOS stand for to make students relaize the value of open source software and be a part of this wonderful and sharing community!)

Beginning of GM (Great Minds) Week

Week 10: (4/9/2010)

RCOS projects are going in a cruise control. Students are doing/completing their projects and updating blogs and codes.

We had four excellent talks. The students are organizing along with RPI-LUG (RPI linux Group) a hack festival on Saturday evening (4/10) to Sunday Morning (4/11). As usual, students are accomplishing great things - I should soon take time to list them in the Accomplishments section.



The four talks are by

1) Jonathan Rosenberg and Justin Lipton

2) Sean Austin, Richmund Fries, Diana Mazzola and Griffin Milsap

3) Robert Carr and Amy Wielizcka

4) Timothy McMullan and Tom Rozanski


Please look at the dashboard http://dashboard.rcos.cs.rpi.edu/groups/dashboard/1
to see the students' progress.

Jonathan and Justin have made a substantial progress with their medialist project. Their demo was impressive.

Sean, Diana, Griffin and Richmund's group have made fantastic strides with open source Android Visualization. Their touch-screen demo was impressive with fast display.

Rob and Amy's presentation software has been coming along. Rob wanted to show a demo but could not because of hardware issues - we hope to see that on 4/16.

Timothy and Tom's group on hiding text in a wave file have been amazing. Their demo perked the interests of many.

Hope all of these useful software find the laptops/desktops of interested users. We hope that and many willing users will share and contribute code.


Due date for RCOS summer (2010) URP projects is this Thursday (4/15/2010). Please submit your completed application forms to me or to Prof. Badri Roysam.


On May 7, 2010 (Friday) we will have poster presentation of RCOS projects.

Good Friday

Week 9: (4/2/2010)

What a beautiful Friday with a picture perfect Spring weather and an energetic
participation by all the students. It was a good Friday!

We had three marvellous talks, a lot of activities and accomplishments by
RCOS participants.

The three talks are by

1) Devin Ross

2) Joe Chrzanowski

3) Marcus Hanwell (kitware)

Please look at the dashboard to see the students' progress. I am extremely happy with the tenacity, resilience and perseverance of the students efforts in making their projects successful. More importantly they are learning, requesting for help, sharing
their code and expertise.

Devin's tapku library for IPhone has a lot of followers. He used some of this framework in his IDigg apps (for IPhone - now ranked number one in the news category).

Joe's project is going awesome. His Build your WebSite dynamically is fantastic. He even showed how to create a simple blogging system. Joe is onto something that may be extremely useful to a lot of people.

Marcus (who works at Kitware) talked about his experiences of Google Summer of Code and extolled the virtues. This website http://socghop.appspot.com/ describes Google's open source summer of code. The dead line for applying for this is April 9, 2010.

Rob Escriva and Eric Allen are mentoring Google Summer of Code Projects.

Rob Esriva's GSOC Project:

The CHASM project has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code [1] project under Kernel.org. If you're unemployed for the summer, or currently searching for a job, the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program is a great way to be paid to write open source software.

We're currently looking for one student to apply to work on CHASM for the summer. Details can be found on the Kernel.org wiki [2]. In particular we are looking for a developer who:

- Has experience working with the Git scm.
- Understands C++ programming and has a thorough knowledge of the STL.
- Has experience with Unix systems programming.
- Is comfortable writing low-level network code (e.g. using BSD sockets).
- Is ambitious and willing to bring fresh, new ideas and perspective to the
project.

If you're interested please email me soon. The deadline is April 9th at 19:00
UTC (5:00PM local time).

Thank you,
Robert Escriva
Primary Mentor, CHASM, GSoC 2010

1. http://code.google.com/soc/
2. https://korg.wiki.kernel.org/


Eric Allen is mentoring Google Summer of Code Project. The details may be found here:

To recap, Selenium is a framework for automated testing of web applications. You write tests in your language of choice, and they can run against practically every popular browser out there. In addition, Selenium IDE lets you easily record tests in the browser with a simple, intuitive interface. If you're building web applications, you might want to think about joining the ~2 million others who use Selenium to test their software, including a lot of big names like Google. Just being able to say you know how to work with Selenium can be a major boost when looking for a job.

The Selenium project has been accepted into GSoC 2010, but we need students to make this happen! We've developed a preliminary list of potential projects, but if you've got a better idea, we'd love to hear it. Our mentors are all really top-notch, and trust me, you'll get a lot of attention from them (Grace will make sure of that). It's a mature project, but we're going through a major transition here with Selenium 2.0. You get the best of both worlds: green pastures and experienced mentors.

Now, here's what we need from you: participation! If you're even the least
bit curious, let me know and we can talk details. Thanks!

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.