RCOS was funded by donations from Sean O’Sullivan ’85 and allows students to work on elaborate projects for a semester or more, depending on the difficulty of the device or software being created. The program aims to create socially-relevant open source software that will help the general population. RCOS also provides research stipends to undergraduate students.

Among these undergraduate students are Amit Kumar ’10 and Devin Ross ’10, who began working with RCOS after approaching numerous professors about their long-time goal of working on a specific project. They collaboratively designed Vault—a pragmatic software for the iPhone, which is now ranked in the top ten of all financial software available on the iPhone.

Vault allows users to log, track, and manage their personal finances for their iPhones—which are becoming increasingly more accessible. The password-protected software is open source, which means that there are no restrictions on distribution or modification. The software has already had 3,000 free downloads within the last three months.

Ross describes Vault as “Quicken for iPhone,” as it is simple yet robust, eliminating the need for a check register or personal checkbooks, which most people find a hassle to keep and use. The ubiquity of iPhones as well as the need for convenient financial management mean the software has the potential to be very widely useful. Vault allows the user to place expenses in customizable categories. The application is also equipped with GPS, allowing the user to conveniently locate the closest bank branch, and can even link directly to the bank’s website or call the bank.

Another cell phone-based project that was recently realized by RCOS is a sonar device that alerts users to the presence of objects in the cell phone’s field of hearing, providing enough feedback to assist the disabled in navigation.

Yongqian Li ’11 is working on a project called Data Mining Wikipedia or “Wikiminer,” the goal of which is to create a specialized search engine for Wikipedia that is superior to generic ones, such as Google. This proves to be difficult, as, according to the project blog, the Wikipedia data set is so large that it is impossible to use traditional methods such as SQL databases to compile all the infomation. The full text of the English version of Wikipedia, without revision history or contributor information, is about 60 gigabytes when uncompressed. “The file wouldn’t even fit on my hard drive, so I had to use a streaming technique to process it bit-by-bit,” Li explained.

Another recent project is RPI Android, whose ultimate goal is to make a “smart” program to handle to-do lists. The current plan is to make a basic to-do list, then expand on this idea, introducing integrated categories and priorities. Later, the RCOS team plans to integrate GPS into the list.

More wiki- and GPS-based projects are in development, such as RPI Map on Semantic Wiki, an online map system for the RPI campus using Google Maps and Semantic Wiki technologies. Such an online map is intended to help new students to make their way around campus, thereby eliminating the confusion that ails many students at the start of freshman year. RPI Planner is another functional piece of RCOS software that is freely available online to students, allowing them to manually enter courses and create their plan of study.