Google / Portland State University Summer of Code

[Apologies for the lateness of this. Hopefully it's still useful.]

2012 was another highly successful summer for Google / PSU Summer of Code, with all accepted proposals completing successfully.

The emphasis this year was on projects related to the Weave project, led by Georges Grinstein and David Percy. Weave is a web-based data analysis and visualization platform whose development is centered at University of Massachusetts Lowell. However, several other unique projects were accepted and completed as well. In the table below, the Weave-based projects are italicized.

Title	Student	Mentor
An accessibility module for visualizations using Weave, an open-source visualization platform	Heather Byrne	David Percy
Asynchronous rendering to support large data sets in Weave	Andrew Dufilie	Georges Grinstein
AVT Open Source Quadcopter Platform	Jenner Hanni	David Camarillo
Collaboration in Visualization	John Fallon	David Percy
Extending the Open Source Weave Analysis and Visualization Platform for the Biological Community	Sanjay Anbalagan	Georges Grinstein
Global General Assembly	M. C. McGrath	Georges Grinstein
InfoMaps: A tool for Personal Information Management and Analysis	Sebastin Kolman	David Percy
State Space Search Optimizer for Electronic Design Automation	David Heineck	Bart Massey

2011 was a successful year for the Google/PSU Summer of Code program and its students. The 11 accepted projects all completed, and some really impressive work was done. Here's a list of students, titles and mentors.

• David Lazar, Formal Executable Semantics of Haskell, Aaron Tomb and Joe Hurd
• Helena Scheuble, An Android Mobile App for Barcode-Based Search of Food Allergies, David Chiu
• Mark Harviston, Mentor Scheduling Program for University Studies, William Garrick
• Martin Cenek, Genetic Algorithm Toolkit for Lush 2.0, Bart Massey
• Nikos Hatzopoulos, Displaying subsurface features in a virtual world, Patrick Hogan and David Percy and Tisham Dhar
• Peter Soots, Spatially referencing sub-images inside larger images for online editing and publication, David Percy
• Rishi Benegal, Arduino Motor and Sensor Toolkit, Bart Massey
• Siddharth Kothari, Personalized, adaptive game-play to improve learning in Tuxmath, Bart Massey
• Skylar Hiebert, FreeQuiz, David Chiu
• Tim Kochanski, A Plugin to consume Open311 Requests into an Ushahidi Map, David Percy
• Travis Hall, Git in the Classroom!, Bart Massey

We ran things a little differently in 2011, and I think this helped with a success. In addition to David Percy, who has helped out with the program for the past several years, Washington State University Vancouver professor David Chiu also helped with mentoring of his students. We had weekly group IRC meetings for the first time, and this really helped keep everyone on task and helped us keep track of what was happening.

I'm currently working on PSU's applicaton to mentor again for GSoC 2012! Hoping we'll be accepted and get another great contingent again this year.

This week marked the announcement of the six students selected to participate in Google / Portland State University Summer of Code 2010. This marks the sixth year of PSU participation in GSoC, and as always the students look quite strong. They are:

• Vegard Nossum (Mentor: Bart Massey), Improving Linux kernel configuration using a boolean satisfiability constraint (SAT) solver. Vegard plans to integrate a Boolean satisfiability constraint (SAT) solver into the Linux kernel configuration system. Using a SAT solver will greatly improve the usability and safety of the kernel's configuration system.

• Keith Olson (Mentor: David Percy), Referencing Interface for Petrography Slide Analysis Using Open Source GIS Tools. Keith aims to develop a method for referencing smaller images (electron microscope scale) taken of a petrographic slide (a thin slice of a rock mounted on a glass slide) to an overall image of the entire slide. The resulting referenced images will form zoom-able map layers for that particular petrographic slide. These layered images can be embedded to the limit of resolution of the electron microscope.

• Daniel Colish (Mentor: Tom Harke), Cockerel: A Web-based Educational Proof Assistant Based on Coq. Using the Coq theorem proof assistant, Dan will connect a javascript based web editor that allows new students of logic to write and verify proofs. This will give instant feedback to students, allowing a more efficient learning process, and make the grading of these results easier on instructors.

• Deen Bhuricha Sethanandha (Mentor: Bart Massey), PatchMetrix: Understanding and improving OSS patch contribution process capability. The aim of this project is to develop a tool, PatchMetrix, to collect data in order to gain better understanding of the OSS patch contribution process capability, and thus improve the process. PatchMetrix will include patch statistics and visualization. The information provided by PatchMetrix will help identify key process problems, and guide the community in making improvements.

• Nisarg Kothari (Mentor: Jasper Jon Lieber), Shogi Application for Android . Nisarg will port the program GNU Shogi to the Android platform, and create a polished touch-friendly interface to it. Shogi is a Japanese board game that belongs to the Chess family.

• Addison Cugini (Mentor: Brian Granger), Symbolic Framework for Quantum Computation in Sympy. Using the symbolic framework of Sympy, Addison plans on creating a set of libraries that will symbolically simulate a quantum computer in a notationally clear way. This project is under the aegis of the SymPy project, a Python-based symbolic library.

We want to especially thank the mentors and other volunteers that make it possible for PSU to participate in GSoC. Looking forward to a great Summer!

The deadline for SoC applications is coming right up. If you're thinking of applying, please get an application in! You can continue to work on your proposal after the deadline, but we can't consider you unless we have something now.

A GIS project was just added to the ideas page. Those with a possible interest in this area might want to take a look at it.

We received word today that Portland State University has once again been accepted as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization. We're real eager to get started on another year.

Please see the ideas and propose links to understand what we're looking for and what your application should look like.

Because I've had so many spam applications to join this site, I've had to moderate applications for accounts on this site. It may take a few days for me to process your application; if so, I'm sorry. Please fill in all the requested information in some sensible way so that I can tell you from the spammers.

Thanks much for your interest in Google/PSU Summer of Code!

The 2008 Google / PSU Summer of Code is long over. Here's a quick, belated summary of the 2008 year.

Portland State University was able to mentor seven projects in 2008. Of these, six completed successfully. These were:

• Mentor: Joshua Triplett; Student: Alexey Zaytsev. A C code "linker" based on SPARSE. The student successfully constructed this key component of a multi-file static analyzer.

• Mentor: David Percy; Student: Devin Chalmers. CocoaBugs: An Artificial Life Framework. The student created a framework / testbed for a particular class of a-life models, with a beautiful user interface.

• Mentor: Greg Kroah Hartman; Student: Loren Davis. Open Doors. The student built an open-source Linux implementation of Sun's Doors interprocess communication framework.

• Mentor: Len Shapiro; Student: Tom Raney. The PostgreSQL Optimizer Exposed. The student combined some existing solutions for instrumentation and visualization with new code to obtain a powerful tool for understanding the detailed workings of the PostgreSQL query optimizer on a given query.

• Mentor: Keith Packard; Student: Ralf Juengling. Revamping Lush's Memory Management. The student wrote an incremental garbage collection library for Lush based on ideas from the Nickle programming language implementation. The result will also be folded back into Nickle.

• Mentor: Len Shapiro; Student: Adam Bresee. A System for Patent Categorization and Analysis. The student wrote natural-language analysis code to mine the US Patent database.

Congratulations to all these students, and our most grateful thanks to their mentors. This was highly appreciated.

We are both proud and grateful to have once again been accepted by Google as a Summer of Code mentoring organization for 2008. We look forward to your high-quality proposals, and to working with some of you over the Summer!

In 2008, Portland State University is once again applying to be a Summer of Code Mentoring organization. We don't plan major changes from last year, but there will be a couple of things we're going to try to improve the program.

PSU Prof. Len Shapiro has agreed to help me with the program this time around. I am excited about this on two counts. First and foremost, Prof. Shapiro is a brilliant scholar and brings to the table administrative and time-management skills that I can really use. Secondly, his interest in open source databases fills a big hole in our capability set.

Of course, we are not guaranteed a slot in Google Summer of Code this year. We will let you know when we receive word on this; we are hopeful for another good year of SoC.

Here, in no particular order, are the students and mentor who will be participating in Summer of Code projects supervised by Bart Massey in 2007. Congratulations to those students and mentors participating, and thanks to all of you, accepted or not, for the work you put into making this program a success.

Google/PSU Summer of Code

Our proud tradition continues. Google was quite generous with slots for us this year; we look forward to many successes.

• Douglas McKenzie
  autoAuto - A mechanical simulation package for amateur motorsport
  Mentor: David Allen
  
  
• Sean McLaughlin
  A Formal Proof in Algebra: The Fundamental Theorem of Galois Theory
  Mentor: Thomas Harke
  
  
• Arnoldo Jose Muller Molina
  A distributed similarity search engine: matching Xenarthras and ...
  Mentor: Cynthia Brown
  
  
• Yevgeny Binder
  Using Software Defined Radio for Aircraft Navigation
  Mentor: Erik Walthinsen
  
  
• Chris Wu
  Linear algebra package for Sympy
  Mentor: Mike Haertel
  
  
• Bhuricha Deen Sethanandha
  TracMetrix: Integrated project tracking and metrics repository
  Mentor: Bart Massey
  
  
• Spencer Janssen
  XHSB: an X binding for Haskell, based on XCB
  Mentor: Jamey Sharp
  
  

Google/X.Org Summer of Code

This year marks the first that Bart Massey is running Google Summer of Code for X.Org also. There were some very tough competitors for these slots; we only had three.

• Tiago Vignatti
  Moving the mouse handling code into a separate thread
  Mentor: Daniel Stone
  
  
• Thomas Hunger
  Generating the XCB C code in Python
  Mentor: Anselm R. Garbe
  
  
• Andrew Howe
  Server Side XCB
  Mentor: Ian Osgood
  
  

X.Org Vacation of Code

In response to the large number of quality proposals received for Google/X.Org Summer of Code that could not be funded by Google, the X.Org Foundation Board voted unanimously to fund proposals itself. This is the first year for the X.Org "Vacation of Code" program; we hope it will be a success, and can be repeated in the future.

• Arthur Huillet
  Xv support for Nouveau driver
  Mentor: Alexander Deucher
  
  
• Nicolas Martyanoff
  Patent-free S3TC compression implementation for Mesa
  Mentor: Brian Paul
  
  
• Philipp Heise
  XCBScope/Dissector-Library
  Mentor: Matthias Hopf
  
  

Again, thanks to all of you who applied.

Thanks to the continuing generosity of Google, it is time once again for Summer of Code at PSU. Please see the ideas and ideas forum links above for project guidelines. Proposals that follow the guidelines of the propose link above have a much, much better chance of being accepted. Please do let us know if you have any questions. Looking forward to your application…