Google / Portland State University Summer of Code

Synopsis and benefits

Verification is an idiom underlying tools such as make and its competition, automated testing tools such as DejaGnu, monitoring tools such as sysmon and mon, and standards-testing tools such as lintian.

A single tool will be written to use this commonality to solve these broad families of problems in a way that feels tailored to each and brings more power to each yet is the same for them all. This tool can be used to replace or supplement any of the tools listed above, or be extended to any problem, currently known or yet to be identified, with the underlying verification idiom (explained in Project details).

Synopsis and benefits

Users moving between computer systems---particularly when entering a new one such as when arriving at a new school or a new job---often struggle with getting login accounts set up, re-creating their favored configurations, and even the enormous challenge of updating their new e-mail address or other contact information with their friends.

A standard protocol for identity servers to collect this information and control access to it would provide for simple, configuration-less migration of users, an easy way to get public information about users, and a simple way to organize the personal data that would otherwise be tossed about between less-constant services, such as instant messenger profiles and names.

W Isaac Carroll
icarroll@pobox.com

Title: Software GPS Correlator for Universal Software Radio Peripheral

Synopsis: I will develop correlator routines for acquiring and tracking signals from GPS satellites. These routines will bridge the gap between the universal software radio peripheral (USRP) and existing open source GPS receiver software (GPL-GPS).

Benefits: This project will substantially lower the barriers to the development of extended GPS applications. It will also enable research and development of open hardware GPS receiver designs.

Deliverables:
* software GPS correlator

I've placed two proposals on other sites: GAINS: GPS-Aided Inertial Navigation System and Wi-Fi Phy in Software. I think these are at final draft status; comments at jamey@cs.pdx.edu would be appreciated.

You can view my proposal at http://nexp.cs.pdx.edu/~sdr/cgi-bin/view/Sdr/RocketTelemetry

Name: Mick Thomure
Email: thomure@cs.pdx.edu

Title: MozTorch - Machine Learning for the Mozilla Community

Synopsis:
Machine learning has become an increasingly useful area of computer science contributing to such diverse areas as biomedical research, image recognition, prediction of highway traffic congestion, and web document searching. Perhaps most relevant to the Mozilla project, machine learning techniques have made it possible to significantly reduce junk email by automatically filtering unwanted messages. The goal of MozTorch is to provide these techniques to the Mozilla community for use in email filtering and other future applications. This will be accomplished by leveraging Mozilla's technology to give developers access to the Torch open source C++ library as an XPCOM component.

Name: Wren Thornton

Contact: [...]

Project: Tsukuru Project Building Ontology (tsukuru)

Synopsis:
The main component of Tsukuru (Japanese for "make" or "construct") is to design an "ontology"--that is, the structure of ideas behind a language--for building projects. A secondary component is programming a utility that reads a language based on that ontology to actually build projects.

Benefits to the Community:
GNU Make is a 20-year-old project building tool with some serious limitations, but it is still the premiere build tool for F/OSS today. By designing from ideas to implementation with an ontology-driven build tool rather than designing from implementation to automation, Tsukuru will be a more powerful, more intuitive build tool.

Name: Wren Thornton

Contact: [...]

Project: Paperboy Web Data Manager (pbwdm)

Synopsis:
The Paperboy Web Data Manager is series of programs/scripts for running data-driven websites leveraging the opensource Paperboy RSS project.

Benefits to the Community:
PBWDM will provide a simple, lightweight framework to design a data-driven website without some of the complexity that arises with SQL-based data-driven websites. By providing such a simple way to separate data from presentation, new web developers can be introduced to the concepts of good design even before they make the leap from personal to public design.

Finished with proposal, trimmed it down, and submitted. Segmentation problems have been solved as I intend to isolate each building by tax lot. This leaves me with only the uncommon case of multiple buildings on a single tax lot, which can be solved by sorting tax lots by size and applying separate identification algorithms.

Unfortunately I lose at xml so this is my first draft proposal in text format. I'll clean this up tomorrow morning.