Week 8 (10/23/2012) Fall 2012

Week 8 (10/23/2012) Fall 2012

We are more or less done with first round talks after this week. So we had 7 talks - It is very hard to summarize. All the projects are progressing along well. Many of them (talks 3, 5, 6 and 7) showed demos of their projects. There were active participation by other RCOS  students.  There are so many activities (a healthy sign) that foster creativity in and around RCOS. I am glad that I could partake in some of them.

The list of talks that was given are:

1) Dan Vegeto , Rebecca Nordhauser, Jesse Freitas  Collective Congress http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/collective-congress/

2) Ari Munic  RNA Simulation http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rna-simulation-with-simtk/

3) Sheena McNeil   koob kook - A reverse cookbook http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koobkooc-a-reverse-cookbook/

4) Zachary Jablons, Jerry Schneider Blue Mesh http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bluemesh/

5) Rachel Redner, Nick Timakondu, Asher Glick Zadatak Scheduler App http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/zadatak-scheduler-app/

6) Brian Barnes - RQ  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rq/

7) Zhixun Wang - Djinta  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/djinta/

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

Week 7 (10/16/2012) Fall 2012

We are in the midway point of the semester. RCOS projects are going well and the students are spending time with courses and projects. This week we had two talks. We are glad to have a past RCOS student to come and give a talk. 

1. Jorel Lalici is working on CORSAIR According to Jorel "the software I am working on is instead focusing on facilitating freedom of speech in an academic setting. The intended use would be to share notes and materials for courses, as well as host an open discussion forum. CORSAIR has no public facing page, or server. The authentication server has no indication of what is on the server, and is only contacted as needed (if no nodes can be automatically discovered). As it is entirely p2p, it does not directly facilitate sharing of anything to the public. As CORSAIR actually significantly limits the scope of FreeNet (removing a lot of features and restricting the network to subnets), while merely adding a more user friendly interface tailored to use for academic materials, it actually removes much of the ability for CORSAIR to be misused." -  Knowing Jorel I am hopeful that CORSAIR will be useful not only to RPI community but to the whole free world.  There were many interesting questions and discussions to Jorel's talk.

BTW Jorel has a kickstarter campaign for his Piled Project. Here is the URL  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2113011562/programmable-intelligent-led-development-system-pi?ref=card

2. John Britton who is working as a GitHub liaison with educational institutions gave a whirl wind tour of GitHub. As usual his presentation was lucid and crisp.  The students being intimately familiar with GitHub were able to understand every word of it. Further many interesting questions were asked.

We had an overflow of students listening to the talks in AE 216.

Week 6 (10/12/12) Fall 2012

Week 6 (10/12/12) Fall 2012

RCOS students on Open CS Day (10/13/12)

With a compressed week of 4 days (because of Columbus Day weekend), RCOS students accomplished in 4 days what could be accomplished in 5 days!. Please see RCOS students in Open house here https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.454650024577901.99346.194611683915071&type=1

We had a great set of talks presented this week.

1) Jorel Lalicki (actually a short presentation... makerfaire etc.) MakerFaire Trip report http://makerfaire.com/pub/e/9158

Jorel gave a presentation about his experiences in Maker Faire - Jorel had a great time and his project attracted around 500 visitors (including open hardware people, TI engineers and Startup firms). 

2) Beth Werbaneth Kinect Gesture Library http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/kinect-gesture-library/

Beth's project is to build kinect library for motion sensing. Her project is coming along. Here is her youtube presentation
  

3) Bharath Santosh and Dimitry Dimitrov Peirce Logic http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/peirce-logic/

Bharat gave a status update of his project - a simple system to learn propositional logic. The only operator is the cut operator. Using the operator, one can build any propositional logic expression. He has completed three of the four macro level constructs. Dimitri is working on GUI and Bharat is working on the backend - He is using javascript as an implementation language with rafael.js 
Bharat demoed his system.  There were interesting questions and suggestions from the participants.

4) Nick Pachulski Food Friend http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/food-friend/ 

Nick is making an IPhone and IPad application for buying groceries with limited budgets. Final goal is to make his system usable by fraternities. Nick is using Ruby on Rails. Nick has been making a steady progress. Since this is a large project, Nick may want to have some milestones for his own good.

5) Colin Rice bitHopper  http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/bithopper/

Colin has been working on bitcoin. He has making substantial progress - currently his project involves pool jumping.

6) Shawn Denbow and Brendan Clark Dr. Memory http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/dr-memory/

Shawn and Brendan (freshman) are going strong with Dr. Memory. Shawn has already added many 64 DLL calls to Dr. memory.  Brendan is catching up with understanding Dr. memory.

7) Brendan Ashby - pLANer - Re-factored DB and GUI code. :) http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/planer/

Brendan is concentrating on GUI and the data base. Brendan has made very good progress. Since he is the lone person working on his project.  he is restricting the scope the project. Brendan also showed a demo of his project.

Again I learned a lot from the students' presentations and questions and suggestions. 

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

Week 5 (10/2/2012) Fall semester 2012

RCOS Poster Presentation on Oct 5, 2012

Exams, Homework, Projects and RCOS are going in full swing for RCOS students. They have been doing an outstanding job so far.  Six groups of students gave a poster presentation during Enterpreneur of the year Celebration, We had our usual presentations and discussions during our weekly meeting.

 Zachary Clapper  on Penguin Electronics Management System http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/penguin-electronics-inventory-management-system/ 

Zach gave a nice presentation on Electronics Inventory Management System.  Zach is working on the front end. Zach, being a JavaScript expert, rightly chose Javascript as his implementation language. There are a few other people working on this project. Please take a look at the blog written by http://penguin-electronics-inventory.blogspot.com/ Zach's presentation prompted a number of interesting suggestions and questions.

Remy Artega  (Servino Center) on Open Source Business Models 

Remy works with Servino Center and he is a serial enterpreneur. Remy gave an excellent presentation on the pitfalls of start up ( As he puts it, 90% of the start ups fail). Remy gave tips how to do a start up - Have a mock up, know the customer base and source of revenue. More importantly Remy suggested ways of starting open source business ventures. Many students expressed an interest.

David Vorick Blind64 http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/blind/

David talked about Bind64.  His program automates some of the tedious procedures involved with encoding using x264 (this is a video encoding program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X264 ) x.264 is a successful free and open source program but it is tedious to use. Bind64 will free up some of the tediousness of these tasks.  There were interesting questions about whether a good documentation will be better than a program to simplify the tasks (I can only smile whether any one reads a documentation - one does not even read emails!)

As usual it is an enjoyable Friday late afternoon spent in the company of bright and eager minds.

Week 4 (9/25/2012) Fall 2012

Week 4 (9/25/2012) Fall 2012

We had a very successful Hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012) - For photos please see here
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.447073848668852.97468.194611683915071&type=1
(Thanks to Asher Glick for organizing it) With the result of a hackathon,the students made a fantastic progress as shown by the above snapshot ( 21 of the 26 projects updated!)

We had four talks this week,
1) Damian Mastylo, Austin Gulati, Chris Celi  The Collegiate
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/the-collegiate/

This group of freshmen talked about the collegiate where they are creating an Android App for
aggregating all the information needed for freshmean (including the schedule of classes, labs, when homeworks are due, when the exams are, when should they prepare for the exams, do the home works etc). They have made good progress with a few of these things already implemented (thanks to Hackathon as posted in their blog http://codequarry.net/2012/09/25/the-collegiate-gatorade-fueled-progress/ ). There were lively questions answer sessions afterwards and a lot of suggestions were given by upperclassmen.


2) Ken Zalewski '89 '91 Open Source in NY senate/Government

Next we had a talk from our alumni Ken Who works in the NY Senate dotCIo office in making the government transparent. As per his recollections, his talk included:  discussing some of their open source projects at the New York State Senate, including their Drupal-based website (NYSenate.gov), their Constituent Relationship Management system (based on CiviCRM.org), and their Java/Tomcat projects, which include OpenLegislation, SAGE (Senate Address Geocoding Engine), and BillBuzz.

There were lively questions from eager students which range from eliminating middle men and people utilizing the transparent form of government. It is worth mentioning (Thanks to Colin Sullivan '11) a TED video where Graylin Kim '11's work in the NYSenate and NYSenate work were mentioned in a TED talk (at 14:06 mark) in 
http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government.html

3) Thomas Chestna Scrutiny http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/scrutiny/

Next Tom talked about his plagiarism detection software called Scrutiny. Tom started working on this project (mentored and originally started by Rob Escriva '10) summer of 2011. Tom has made a fantastic progress and he is cleaning up the code and planning to conduct more tests. From the students attending the meeting, it looks like CS 2 may be utilizing his software for plagiarism detection software (among scrutiny's advantages include it being open source, setting up the threshold, and looking at the structure of the code than looking at the lexical level).

4. Christian Johnson, Dan Kimball, Mike Horowitz RPIDirectoryApp
http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-directory-app/

Finally Christian, Dan and Mike talked about improving their RPI Directory app to include all names, hosting in a non-cloud table (key value pairs) and  bring the statistics page. They are also planning to do additional information about the names (with the consent of the person). As we were running past 5:15 pm at this time, there were fewer questions. Many students talked to this group after the meeting.

All in all, it is a fantastic meeting, well presented talks and more importantly, RCOS students were willing to share their ideas and suggestions.

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Week 3 (9/18/2012) Fall 2012

Hackathon on September 22, 2012

All the RCOS application forms have been submitted to office of Undergraduate education. We have been picking up momentum and the students are active with doing their projects.  Thanks to Asher Glick, RCOS had a first hackathon on Saturday (9/22/2012). Photo above was taken then.
We are officially in the Fall season.

Stephen Silber, James McM, Colin Steifel  RPIMobile http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/rpi-mobile/

Stephen, James and Colin presented their progress with RPIMobile. IPhone portion of it has come along well. James is doing backend stuff and creating a SQLite data base. Colin is porting it to Android (he has just started). Asusual there were interesting questions and suggestions from the participant. Stephen showed a demo of his project (IPhone part)

Matt  Zanchelli  Sonar http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/sonar/

Matt updated about his two past project Cloud and Passcode..Passcode has been selected to be featured on Apple's Safari Extension Gallery.  Cloud piqued the interest of a start up!. Matt's current RCOS project is to write an easy to file bug reporter for Mac software. Matt has been progressing along.

Deon Robinson  FastAPI http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/freakapi/

Deon has been working on linking Images to Data project for a while now. This is his official RCOS project this semester. The idea is to open source image and object recognition. The ultimate goal is to make augmented reality. You can read more about this  in his blog http://trymirage.blogspot.com/

Alex Freska, Patrick Teague, Brian Le, Jacob DeWitt   FlowUR http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/flowur/

Alex, Patrick, Brian and Jacob have been progressing with their FlowUr (Drawing flow charts). They are storing their flowcharts in SVG and most of the code is in Javascript and storing the charts in JSON format. They have a good routing algorithm. They have provided template mechanisms for others to make different drawings. They showed a demo. FlowUr project is progressing along well.

Thanks to Dr. Goldschmidt for writing last week's blogs. I should also appreciate all the mentors who re doing phenomenal things (along with their ambitious course loads and other activities).

I am honored to be associated with this group.

Week 2 Fall 2012 (9/11/2012)

Thanks as always to our mentors, Jerry and Asher, for running the show today.  We had a full docket of excellent speakers from across campus.  And, though it's not widely known yet, RCOS has new dedicated space in Amos Eaton -- three adjacent (and connected) offices on the second floor (205, 206, and 207).  This semester, we'll work on getting that space in shape for full RCOS use.  In fact, please email me your "laundry list" of wants/needs for that space and we'll see what we can do!

Our four talks were as follows:

1. Gary Schwartz opened the afternoon with an overview of his involvement with open source software in the dotCIO office (and beyond).  There are numerous projects, both old and new, going on within dotCIO here on campus, so don't hesitate to contact Gary with questions, ideas, etc.  And indeed, as Gary discussed, GitHub is the "cool" LinkedIn.  Any open source projects to data mine GitHub?

2. Professor Sibel Adali took time away from her new "Python in CSCI-1100" efforts to talk about open source needs in research, in particular for open data.  There are ridiculous amounts of data publicly available, including Twitter data -- and it's not just keyword-based techniques being used.  The network graphs can reveal interesting things about our online relationships and personalities.  Contact Prof. Adali if you'd like to get involved!

3. Kenley Cheung talked about open source successes and efforts in the Web Technologies Group, an agency of the RPI Student Senate formed in 2006.  Concerto is one of the most successful projects thus far, used throughout the world!  Get involved with the latest Concerto revision or new projects by contacting Kenley.

4. Finally, Colin Kuebler presented his Koala project, a language for the Web that sits on top of JavaScript. Colin showed off his very fancy and versatile user interface -- and it was suggested that the UI be extracted and submitted as a standalone open source GUI project.  Check out Colin's work at http://rcos.rpi.edu/projects/koala/ (and encourage him to prepare a presentation next time!).  :-)

Please continue to update your projects and blogs (i.e. let the RPI community and the world know what you're doing!).  And sign up for talks (via URL below).  Remember that talks are to show off some of your work, but also to garner feedback and ideas from your peers and mentors!

Talk sign up: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmUFEZRUC23ddDg3bnF5Rnd3OHZNdFR6UkZjQUUxTFE&hl=en#gid=0