Who is New in Google Summer of Code - Part 2

This is the 9th year of Google Summer of Code and we are excited to welcome over 40 new open source organizations into the Google Summer of Code community. Last Friday we started our summer series of weekly posts describing some of these open source organizations and the projects their students are working on this summer. We have three more organizations featured below.

Cesium is a JavaScript library for creating 3D globes and 2D maps in a web browser without a plugin. It uses WebGL for hardware-accelerated graphics, and is cross-platform, cross-browser, and tuned for dynamic-data visualization. Cesium is open source under the Apache 2.0 license.

We're thrilled to have two students working with us on Cesium this summer. André Nunes will be adding client-side support for the KML standard, allowing users to easily visualize the many geographic feature data sets which are widely available in KML files. Ravi Agrawal will be adding a Navigation Widget, providing on-screen camera controls to give users another way to interact with the globe in addition to our current click-and-drag mouse controls.

By Scott Hunter, Cesium Organization Administrator 

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mlpack is a recent effort to provide a "swiss army knife" of fast implementations of machine learning methods, with a focus on tree-based algorithms. It has been shown to be faster than other similar toolkits in a recent paper. Some important issues we are focusing on are the breadth of the algorithms offered, the accessibility of mlpack methods from languages other than C++, and the automatic publication of accurate and relevant timing information for mlpack. 

Three projects were accepted for our inaugural year in Google Summer of Code and each of these addresses one of the three points listed above.

• Addition of two new collaborative filtering methods to improve the breadth of the algorithms mlpack implements (QUIC-SVD and ALS-WR); this will be done by Mudit Raj Gupta.
• The development of a system for the automatic generation of bindings for various languages with minimal maintenance requirements; this will be done by Nick Johnston.
• The creation of a system for automatic benchmarking of mlpack methods and comparisons with other libraries, to be integrated into our Jenkins build server setup.  This project will be done by Marcus Edel.

We are grateful to have been accepted into Google Summer of Code 2013 and look forward to this wonderful opportunity to contribute open-source code into the machine learning world. 

By Ryan Curtin, mlpack Organization Administrator 

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DUNE, the "Distributed and Unified Numerics Environment" is a modular toolbox for solving partial differential equations, like they arise when simulating weather, oil fields, biomechanics, air flow around your car, etc. DUNE was initiated in 2002 and has since evolved to a rather complete toolbox that provides slim templated C++ interfaces allowing efficient use of legacy and/or new libraries. 

We are very excited to have two students contributing to DUNE during Google Summer of Code 2013. Miha Čančula will work on a performance testing framework that will allow us to assess the impact on performance of recent changes. Xiaoxue Gong will help us to visualize surfaces, constructed by bisecting triangles, with Paraview. 

By Markus Blatt, DUNE Organization Administrator

These are only a few of the new organizations participating in Google Summer of Code this year. Stay tuned for more of the 40+ new organizations as they are highlighted next Friday. A complete list of the 177 organizations mentoring students this year and the program timeline are available on the Google Summer of Code program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Get coding faster thanks to little green buttons

Cross-posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog

On the Google Cloud Platform team we're always looking for ways to make developers' lives easier, so you can focus on building interesting applications instead of worrying about managing infrastructure. We also want you to be as productive as possible when you're busy writing code. We provide an SDK which offers access to production APIs, in a way that's compatible with a local development environment.
 

But sometimes you just want to dip your toes in the water, and the prospect of setting up a local development environment seems daunting. What if you just want to try out some sample code? What if you want to see how the actual production APIs will behave? What if you could share a code snippet with a colleague and your entire environment came along for the ride? What if there was a playground where you could try out APIs, all from within your web browser? We asked ourselves these same questions and decided to try an experiment: we created a Cloud Playground, a place for you to quickly test production APIs you're interested in using. Note: the Cloud Playground is currently limited to Python 2.7 App Engine apps. To get you started, we added little green buttons to our getting started documentation, which take you straight to the Cloud Playground where you can edit and run the guestbook sample code as it appears in the documentation.

In addition, the main Cloud Playground page offers easy access to many more samples. There's even an option to clone other open source App Engine Python 2.7 template projects from Github.

How does it work? The Cloud Playground is itself an open source project and consists of two modules:

• mimic is a regular Python App Engine app, which serves as a development server (similar to the App Engine SDK "dev_appserver"), but which runs in the production App Engine environment, providing you access to the production APIs and environment while still offering a quick and easy way to test out bits of code.
• bliss is a trivial browser-based code editor which lets you edit code in the mimic virtual file system (backed by the App Engine datastore), providing you with a user interface so you can see what the mimic app can do for you.

We previously blogged about DevTable which also uses mimic to speed up refresh cycles for their App Engine developers.

We look forward to seeing what you're able to build.

By Fred Sauer, Developer Advocate

Who is New in Google Summer of Code - Part 1

This is the 9th year of Google Summer of Code and we are excited to welcome over 40 new open source organizations into the Google Summer of Code community. This summer we will run a series of posts every Friday describing these open source organizations and the projects their students are working on this summer.

Ruby has for some lacked the professional-quality scientific, numeric, and visualization

libraries of other languages in its class. The SciRuby community believes that the time for a Ruby science and visualization package has come. Our basic packages include statistical tools (statsample, distribution), numerical algorithms (minimization, integration), visualization tools (rubyvis), and matrices (NMatrix). We are funded in part by the Ruby Association, which manages the development of the Ruby language. 

One of our students is working to improve our statistics functionality, which we see as essential in achieving our organizational goals. A second student is writing a Ruby D3 library to replace rubyvis (which is based on protovis), so that our users can write portable, interactive visualization code quickly and easily -- and in Ruby, no less. Our third student is developing a semantic web gem, useful for informatics in nearly any field, which goes beyond what we consider to be basic tools and implements something that few languages have. 

We are pleased to have so many wonderful mentors and students this year, and thank the members of the BioRuby project for their incredible contributions. 

By John Woods, SciRuby Organization Administrator 

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Public Lab is not your typical open source project -- we do combined open hardware and software, and have a focus on environmental issues. We were founded during the BP oil disaster and developed a technique for collecting aerial images of spill sites using cameras hung from balloons and kites. We developed MapKnitter, a web-based open source image stitcher which enables community members to flatten their aerial images manually over a reference map, and outputs GeoTiffs. The images from this system are published under open content licenses and are also represented in Google Earth and Maps, for whom we are a data provider. 

Open source has been a central principle of ours since the beginning, and we've tackled a range of new initiatives to create open source spectrometers, infrared cameras, and other tools, released under the CERN Open Hardware License.  

This year our students are tackling three exciting projects related to three distinct initiatives. Bharat Bhushan is developing a web-based tool for compositing infrared photosynthesis imagery as part of our Infragram project. Mohit Meena is working on an Android app to take aerial images from kites or balloons with some advanced new features, and Sreyanth Mora is developing a system to find closely matched spectra on our Spectral Workbench platform, which drives our open source spectrometry project.  

We're excited for our first year of Google Summer of Code!  

By Jeff Warren, Public Lab Organization Administrator 

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 MuseScore is a leading free and open source music notation software for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is easy to use and makes beautiful sheet music. MuseScore is cross-platform, multi-lingual, open source and licensed under GPLv2. It features an easy to use WYSIWYG editor with audio score playback for results that look and sound beautiful. It supports unlimited staves with up to four voices each, dynamics, articulations, lyrics, chords, lead sheet notation, import/export of MIDI and MusicXML, export to PDF and WAV, plus online score sharing. 

We have two students working with us this summer.   

• Improved MIDI import - Andrey Tokarev will work on more accurate, assisted MIDI importing in MuseScore.   

• MuseScore in the browser - Kyle Messner will work on compiling the MuseScore core library with Emscripten to visualise and transpose scores in the browser. 

By Thomas Bonte, Co-founder & CEO MuseScore

These are only a few of the new organizations participating in Google Summer of Code in 2013. More of the 40+ new organizations will be highlighted next Friday, stay tuned. A complete list of the 177 organizations mentoring students this year and the program timeline are available on the Google Summer of Code program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

You've Got CFF!

Seven weeks ago today, Google along with Adobe and the FreeType project, released a new CFF rasterizer into FreeType for beta testing. Well, it’s been put through its paces and is ready for release. In the latest version of FreeType, build 2.5, the new Adobe CFF rasterizer will now be on by default. This means that products using FreeType, such as Chrome OS, Android, and Linux, will have better looking CFF fonts.  The new CFF rasterizer in FreeType has already been made available in the dev channel build of Chrome OS.

FreeType Using the Old CFF Rasterizer with Light Auto Hint (most common setting)

FreeType Using the Adobe CFF Rasterizer (now the default CFF rasterizer)

The open source community has helped us find and fix several issues during this beta period and we are now ready for a stable release. The Adobe CFF rasterizer will continue to spread to new products. This work paves the way for FreeType-based platforms to provide users with richer and more beautiful reading experiences. This is only the start!

By Stuart Gill, Font and Text Team, Internationalization Engineering

Google Summer of Code coding starts today!

Today is the first day of coding for our 9th year of the Google Summer of Code program. This year 1,192 students will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 177 different open source organizations.

We are excited to see the contributions this year’s students will make to the open source community.

For more information on important dates for the program please visit our timeline. Stay tuned as we will highlight some of the new mentoring organizations over the next few months.

Have a great summer!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Programs