Bitwacker Associates

The Fall 2010 semester marked the beginning of the Tetherless World Constellation’s undergraduate research program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). Although TWC has enjoyed significant contributions from RPI undergrads since its inception, this term we stepped up our game by more “formally” incorporating a group of undergrads into TWC’s research programs, established regular meetings for the group, and with input from the students began outfitting their own space in RPI’s Winslow Building.

Patrick West, my fellow TWC undergrad research coordinator and I asked the students to blog about their work throughout the semester; with the end of term, we asked them to post summary descriptions of their work and their thoughts about the fledgling TWC undergrad research program itself. We’ve provided short summaries and links to those blogs below…

• Cameron Helm began the term coming up to speed on SPARQL and RDF, experimented with several of the public TWC endpoints, and then worked with Philip on basic visualizations. He then slashed his way through the tutorials on TWC’s LOGD Portal, eventually creating impressive visualizations such as this earthquake map. Cameron is very interested in the subject of data visualization and looks to do more work in this area in the future.
• After a short TWC learning period, Dan Souza began helping doctoral candidate Evan Patton create an Android version of the Mobile Wine Agent application, with all the amazing visualization and data integration required, including Twitter and Facebook integration. Mid-semester Dan also responded to the call to help with the crash” development of the Android/iPhone TalkTracker app, in time for ISWC 2010 in early November. Dan continues to work with Evan and others for early 2011 releases of Android, iPhone/iPad Touch and iPad versions of the Mobile Wine Agent.
• David Molik reports that he learned web coding skills, ontology creation, server installation and administration. David contributed to the development and operation of a test site for the new, semantic web savvy website for the Biological and Chemical Oceanography Data Management Office BCO-DMO of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
• Jay Chamberlin spent much of his time working on the OPeNDAP Project, an open source server to distribute scientific data that is stored in various formats. His involvement included everything from learning his way around the OPeNAP server, to working with infrastructure such as TWC’s LDAP services, to helping migrate documentation from the previous Wiki to the new Drupal site, to actually implementing required changes to the OPeNDAP code base.
• Philip Ng worked on a wide variety of projects this fall, starting with basic visualizations, helping with ISWC applications, and including iPad development for the Mobile Wine Agent. Philip’s blog is fascinating to read as he works his way through the challenges of creating applications, including his multi-part series on implementing the social media features.
• Alexei Bulazel began working with Dominic DiFranzo on a health-related mashup using Data.gov datasets and is now working on a research paper with David on “human flesh search engine” techniques, a topic that top thinkers including Tetherless World Senior Constellation Professor Jim Hendler have explored in recent talks. Note: For more background on this phenomena, see e.g. China’s Cyberposse, NY Times (03 Mar 2010)

Many of these students will be continuing on with these or other projects at TWC in 2011; we also expect several new students to be joining the group. The entire team at the Tetherless World Constellation thanks them for their efforts and many important contributions this fall, and looks forward to being amazed by their continued great work in the coming year!

John S. Erickson, Ph.D.