Google Data » Mary Radomile

Mercurial Makers Meet in Munich

Mary Radomile — Tue, 21 Oct 2014 17:44:00 +0000

Back in August, the Google Open Source Programs Office sponsored a meetup for contributors to Mercurial, a distributed version control system. Learn more about their two day hackfest below.

On August 29th-31st, the Mercurial project held one of its twice-a-year sprints in the Google Munich office. Mercurial is a distributed version control system, used by Python, OpenJDK, and Firefox among others. We had 24 developers in attendance, some from companies with large Mercurial deployments and some individual contributors who volunteer in their spare time.

One of the problems Mercurial wants to tackle soon is scaling from supporting hundreds of thousands of files to supporting millions of files in a single repository. The community has identified two approaches to scaling: shallow clones and narrow clones. Shallow clones will allow clients to pull down only part of a repository’s history, and narrow clones will make it possible to pull history for only some files.

At the sprint, we talked through some of the initial narrow/shallow clone implementation hurdles, like how to securely and efficiently store large manifests, and made good progress on a plan. We spent time working on changeset evolution, which makes it easier to manage the process of collaborating on a patch before it’s done. A group also discussed how to make bookmarks work better for users of changeset evolution in large systems, including developing a good plan around remote bookmark management.

If you are interested in finding out more about Mercurial (or perhaps you’d like to contribute to make it scale even better!) you can find our mailing list information here.

By Augie Fackler and Lennard de Rijk, Google Engineering

My summer of code and galaxies

Mary Radomile — Mon, 13 Oct 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Today we have a post from Doris Lee, a 2014 Google Summer of Code student for the Laboratory for Cosmological Data Mining. Doris talks about her fascinating summer project exploring the galaxy.

I first learned about Google Summer of Code (GSoC) through an informational session at my school, UC Berkeley. I was interested because of the program’s project-based nature which sounded like a lot of fun. I started by listing my favorite projects from each organization’s ideas page, and ended up getting so engrossed in the project and the code problem associated with the application that I submitted just one to the Laboratory of Cosmological Data Mining. The Laboratory was founded in 2002 at the University of Illinois by Professor Robert J. Brunner to develop and apply computational technologies to extract cosmological information from large astrophysical data sets being generated within the community.

During GSoC’s community bonding period, my mentor and I discovered my initial project proposal had been completed by another contributor. Together, we came up with an alternative project involving creating image mosaics of galaxies. Although I wasn’t as familiar with the subject matter of this new project, I was still very excited and couldn’t wait to get started!

I soon realized that not knowing much about the topic was actually a good thing. I was always learning something new throughout the summer which kept it both interesting and challenging. It was also the first time that I undertook such a large individual project.

But what I enjoyed the most about GSoC was the freedom to define the direction of my own work. The initial goal of the project was to make mosaics for large, bright galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. However, in our first attempts some of the pictures that we made of the sky contained no galaxy at all! We discovered this was due to inherent inaccuracies in the coordinate values because the catalog was quite old. The course of my GSoC project was turned into developing an algorithm that uses newer imaging data to fix these inaccuracies and then mosaic them into pretty images. In the end, I designed a pipeline that enables users to automatically generate multi-band color images on any catalog of their choice. In addition, this pipeline is designed so it could be used on any set of data taken in the future.

Overall, my mentor was very helpful with guiding me through my project and addressing my questions. I feel lucky to have worked on a project that I was so excited about and something I truly wanted to see working.   Since my project made heavy use of open source software developed by other programmers and members of the scientific community, I learned a lot about how open source software projects are managed, documented, distributed and maintained. This was especially useful when I was developing the user interface and documentation to present my final GSoC project and making the code open source. In addition, I learned that in the free and open-source software community, effective documentation and readable code can be just as important as getting the code to work. The value of publicly-available code derives from how other users can benefit from it. You can view the work here on GitHub.

There are so many organizations who participate in GSoC, it would be hard to find one that isn’t up your alley. I would encourage any interested student to look at the GSoC organizations and ideas lists when they are posted in February. GSoC enables students of all skill sets and levels to learn and contribute to the open source community and to develop skills in real-world software coding and design. And not to mention—it’s a great way to spend your summer!

By Doris Lee, 2014 Google Summer of Code student

Google Summer of Code meetup in New Delhi

Mary Radomile — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Google Summer of Code meetups are a great way for students to spread the word about how the program works and meet fellow open source enthusiasts. If you are interested in holding a meetup at your University, please visit our FAQ page for more information.

On August 23rd, the Jamia Millia Islamia Linux User Group (JMILUG) hosted a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) meetup at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi. The meetup was an opportunity to learn from past and present GSoC students who have actively contributed to open source projects all over the world. The meetup also provided great information for budding developers who are ready to get their hands dirty and contribute to real world projects.

Over the last two years, nine JMILUG members have participated in GSoC. We felt it was time to give back to both the Indian GSoC students and open source community. We started accepting proposals from potential speakers for the event a couple of months before the meetup. Proposals were subject to a voting process through a website we built and speakers from the top voted sessions were called to give a talk.

The event was incredibly popular — we received over 250 registrations! We decided to move to a bigger venue and were able to accommodate everyone that was interested. On the day of the meet-up, we were pleased to welcome student participants from all academic levels and backgrounds.

The Google Open Source Programs Office graciously provided pens and t-shirts for the event. To make the speaker sessions more interactive, we distributed the goodies based on participation in a Q&A session after each talk. This also ensured that attendees listened intently to each speaker.

In total we had seven speakers give talks during the day-long event. Topics ranged from Angular.js to web accessibility. The final session of the day was dedicated to the topic “Getting into GSoC”. A high point was inviting all current GSoC participants on stage and having them share details about their experience and answer questions from the audience.

We wrapped up the day by distributing attendance certificates to speakers and t-shirts to the two most active audience members. Later, a lottery round was conducted and two people were selected randomly from the audience to be awarded another pair of GSoC T-shirts.

We hope that the meetup will attract many new students to GSoC and the world of open source coding. A big thanks to all of our speakers and attendees!

By Vipul Nayyar, GSoC participant in 2013 and 2014 and Umar Ahmad, GSoC participant in 2014

Google Summer of Code 2015 has just been announced! For more information please visit our program website.

Google Summer of Code 2015 and Google Code-in 2014 are on!

Mary Radomile — Mon, 06 Oct 2014 17:00:00 +0000

At Google, we are passionate about introducing students to open source software development. Since 2005, the Open Source Programs team at Google has worked with over 10,000 students and over 485 open source projects in a variety of fields to create more code for us all.

A call to all students: if you have ever thought it would be cool to write code and see it make a difference in the world, then please keep reading. We are excited to announce the next editions of two programs designed to introduce students to open source software development, Google Summer of Code for university students and Google Code-in for 13-17 year old students.

Google Code-in - Program starts for students December 1, 2014

For the fifth consecutive year, we are happy to announce Google Code-in, an international, online contest designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source development. Open source projects are about more than just coding, and this contest highlights a variety of ways to contribute to open source projects.

When you read the term open source, do you think:

What is open source?
What types of work do open source projects do?
I’ve only taken one computer science class, can I contribute to an open source project?
I’m not really into coding, how else can I contribute to open source?
I’ve never participated in open source or an online contest before, can someone help guide me?
Open source sounds fun, how can I get started?

If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then we hope you will join in the fun and excitement of the Google Code-in contest starting Monday, December 1st.

For seven weeks from early December to mid January, the Google Code-in contest will have students working with up to 12 selected open source projects on a variety of tasks. The different categories of tasks that students will be able to work on include:

Code: writing or refactoring
Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
Outreach/research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
User Interface: user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Over the past four years, we have had 1,575 students from 78 countries complete tasks in the contest. This year we hope to surpass 2,000 students.

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in site for more details on how to sign up and participate. We will announce the open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 12. The Google Code-in contest starts for students on December 1. We look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family again this year.

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Google Summer of Code

Back in 2005, Google made a commitment to support open source software contributors. In addition to our other programs to build and support the contributor base, we thought a great way to get more people involved was to introduce the wide world of open source to college students.

Google Summer of Code is an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects mentored by a wide variety of carefully selected open source projects. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all. Over the past 10 years, over 8,300 mentors and 8,500 student developers in 101 countries have produced a stunning 55 million lines of code. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2015 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. Stay tuned for more details coming soon!

By Stephanie Taylor and Carol Smith, Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code wrap-up: Worldforge

Mary Radomile — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 17:00:00 +0000

For our Google Summer of Code wrap-up post this week, we put the spotlight on Worldforge, a project that provides tools to allow users to build their own virtual worlds.

Worldforge had three Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students this year. Now that the 2014 program has ended we’d like to highlight these three students and the work they've done.

Céline Noël, Smartbody integration in Ember.js
Céline worked on integrating the Smartbody system into Ember. Smartbody is a comprehensive system for simulating human behavior with all of the subtle body movements that natural motion entails.

Since Smartbody is a large system dealing with many different facets of human motion, a large part of the work done by Céline involved integration with Ember on the code level. Further work was then done modifying the Ember structure so that human entities can use Smartbody for their underlying animations and movement.

Celine’s work can be seen on Github. It will be merged into the Ember master branch in the coming months.

Péter Szücs, Android support for Ember.js
Péter worked on adding support for Android to Ember, including multi-touch support. The main difficulty initially was getting the Worldforge stack to build for Android using the existing Autoconf build system. Péter has made changes to most of the Worldforge libraries, as well as to the Hammer build tool. Hammer now has built in support for cross platform builds and will set up an Android toolchain by itself.

We expect to provide Android builds of Ember in the next couple of months. Keep an eye on the Worldforge news page for more information about Android support. In the coming weeks, we'll start moving Péter's work into the main repositories.

Yaroslav Taben, Cyphesis Entity filters
Yaroslav worked on adding entity filtering to Cyphesis, the server for Worldforge. Yaroslav’s project can basically be described as "functional filtering of entities using a query language". It is very useful for things like AI code since authors then can more easily write rules for entity behaviour using a query-like language.

Yaroslav worked on both defining the rules for the query language and implementing this in an efficient way in the code. We used an iterative process for the language definition, where we tried out various syntaxes until we found one that fit our specific use case best.

The code can be seen on Github and we plan to start integrating it into Cyphesis in the coming weeks.

All of our students worked hard during the summer and produced excellent results. We're very happy to have been a GSoC participating organization and hope to do so again next year.

By Erik Ogenvik, Organization Administrator, Worldforge

Google Summer of Code wrap-up: Apache Flink (previously Stratosphere)

Mary Radomile — Fri, 26 Sep 2014 17:00:00 +0000

We continue our Friday Google Summer of Code wrap-up series with Apache Flink (previously Stratosphere) who was a first time participant in the program. Organization Administrator Robert Metzger talks below about their two successful student participants as well as their project’s transition to the Apache Software Foundation incubator program.

Apache Flink is a system for expressive, declarative, fast, and efficient data analysis. Flink combines the scalability and programming flexibility of distributed MapReduce-like platforms with the efficiency, out-of-core execution, and query optimization capabilities found in parallel databases.

We were accepted to this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC) under our former project name “Stratosphere”. But during the summer our project entered the incubator of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Incubation is a process for new projects to enter the umbrella of the ASF. As part of the process our project name was subsequently changed from Stratosphere to Flink.

Our move to the ASF also meant quite a few changes for us and our students during the course of their projects. Both mentors and students were able to learn together about the new processes required by the ASF and in the end this transition worked out quite well for everyone involved.

The acceptance of our project into GSoC was a huge, exciting accomplishment for all of the Flink / Stratosphere developers and especially thrilling to a new, first time organization. We had two students this summer: Artem Tsikiridis and Frank Wu.

Artem worked on a full Hadoop MapReduce compatibility layer for Flink. Both Hadoop and Flink are distributed systems for processing huge amounts of data. Hadoop is an open source implementation of the MapReduce algorithm published by Google. It is widely used for a broad range of data intensive computing applications. Flink offers a broad range of operators and can be used to execute MapReduce-style applications.

Artem’s summer project concerned the implementation of a compatibility layer that exposes exactly the same APIs as Apache Hadoop. This feature allows existing Hadoop users to run their Hadoop jobs with Flink. Consequently, users are now able to utilize a faster execution engine for their existing code! Artem worked closely with the community and succeeded in bringing his changes into our main code line. His work will be available with the 0.7-incubating release of Apache Flink.

Frank Wu, our second GSoC student, worked on a large sub-project of Flink called Support for Streaming (Stratosphere Streaming). Frank initiated the development of the mini-batch processing API of Stratosphere Streaming, enabling operations on windows of tuples. Additionally, he contributed to both the iterative and stateful streaming solutions, two of the most challenging applications of streaming. Frank also provided numerous code examples for the topics he was working on. Like Artem, his work will be available with the 0.7-incubating release of Apache Flink.

I would like to thank the mentors, Fabian Hüske and Marton Belassi, as well as our second organization administrator, Ufuk Celebi, for their help with Stratosphere/Flink’s GSoC participation in the summer of 2014.

By Robert Metzger, Organization Administrator for Apache Flink

Google Summer of Code 2014 by the numbers: Part three

Mary Radomile — Wed, 24 Sep 2014 17:00:00 +0000

In our third statistics post for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014 we have a list of schools with the highest number of student participants. For the first time in seven years a new school has claimed the top spot—congratulations to International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students 2014	# of Accepted Students 2013
1	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	69	29
2	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	44	39
3	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani	India	26	19
4	Birla Institute of Technology & Science - Pilani, K K Birla Goa Campus	India	25	16
5	University POLITEHNICA Of Bucharest	Romania	17	25
6	Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	India	15	9
7	National University of Singapore	Singapore	14	15
8	Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi	India	13	9
9	Budapest University of Technology and Economics	Hungary	12	7
9	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	12	17
10	Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	India	11	10
10	International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar	India	11	0
10	Vienna University of Technology	Austria	11	13
10	University Of Waterloo	Canada	11	2

Student majors in 2014 were predominantly in Computer Science and other technical fields (as expected). But this year we also had students studying Anthropology, Cartography, Evolutionary Biology, Linguistics and even Metallurgy. GSoC certainly attracts a diverse set of students year after year! For more stats from 2014, check out the other posts in this series.

We’d like to thank the schools and professors that help spread the word about GSoC to their students. But don’t forget that students from any university are encouraged to participate! Reviewing statistics each year from GSoC is exciting, but being in “first place” is certainly not the most important part of the program. Our goal since the inception of GSoC is to get students involved in the creation of free and open source software, and to encourage contributions to projects that have the potential to make a difference worldwide — no matter what university the student attends.

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code wrap-up: Twitter

Mary Radomile — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Google Summer of Code 2014 has come to a close and news of the great work completed by our 1300+ student participants is starting to pour in. Our first student “wrap-up” post is from Twitter, a three time Summer of Code participant. We’ll be featuring these stories on Fridays this fall.

For the third time, Twitter had the opportunity to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), and we wanted to share news on the resulting open source activities. Unlike many GSoC participating organizations that focus on a single ecosystem, Twitter has a variety of projects that span multiple programming languages and communities. They include:

Use zero-copy read path in @ApacheParquet

Sunyu Duan worked with mentors Julien Le Dem (@J_) and Gera Shegalov (@gerashegalov) on improving performance in Parquet by using the new ByteBuffer based APIs in Hadoop. As a result of the work over the summer, performance has improved up to 40% based on initial testing and the work will make its way into the next Parquet release.

A pluggable algorithm to choose next EventLoop in Netty

Jakob Buchgraber worked with mentor Norman Maurer (@normanmaurer) to add pluggable algorithm support to Netty’s event loop (see pull request). At the start of the summer when a new EventLoop was needed to register a Channel, EventLoopGroup implementations used a round-robin like algorithm to choose the next EventLoop. This was challenging because different events may become more busy than others over time, hence the need for Jakob’s project to support pluggable algorithms to increase performance.

Various compression codecs for Netty

Idel Pivnitskiy (@pivnitskiy) worked with mentor Trustin Lee (@trustin) to add multiple compression codes (LZ4, FastLZ and BZip2) to the Netty project. Compression codecs will allow cutting traffic and creating applications, which are able to transfer large amounts of data even more effectively and quickly.

Android Support For Pants

Mateo Rodriguez (@mateornaut) added Android support to the Pants build system (see commits) so Pants can build Android applications (APKs) on top of the many other languages and tools it supports.

A pure ZooKeeper client for Finagle

Pierre-Antoine Ganaye (@pa-ganaye) was mentored by Evan Meagher (@evanm) to add a pure Apache ZooKeeper client to Finagle to improve performance (see project).

An SMTP client for Finagle

Lera Dymbitska (@suncelesta) worked with mentors Selvin George (@selvin) and Travis Brown (@travisbrown) to add SMTP protocol support to Finagle to improve performance (see pull request). Finagle strives to provide fully asynchronous protocol support so baking in SMTP support was required versus using third party libraries such as javamail and commons-email which are synchronous by design.

Analyze Wikipedia using Cassovary

Szymon Matejczyk (@szymonmatejczyk) worked with mentors Pankaj Gupta (@pankaj) and Ajeet Grewal (@ajeet) to enable Cassovary to analyze Wikipedia data. The result of this work improved the performance of Cassovary when dealing with large graphs. See the commits associated with the project to see how it was done.

We really enjoyed the opportunity to take part in GSoC again this year. Thanks again to our seven students, mentors and Google for the program. We hope to participate again next summer.

Chris Aniszczyk, Organization Administrator, Twitter

Security for the people

Mary Radomile — Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:15:00 +0000

A recent Pew study found that 86% of people surveyed had taken steps to protect their security online. This is great—more security is always good. However, if people are indeed working to protect themselves, why are we still seeing incidents, breaches, and confusion? In many cases these problems recur because the technology that allows people to secure their communications, content and online activity is too hard to use.

In other words, the tools for the job exist. But while many of these tools work technically, they don’t always work in ways that users expect. They introduce extra steps or are simply confusing and cumbersome. (“Is this a software bug, or am I doing something wrong?”) However elegant and intelligent the underlying technology (and much of it is truly miraculous), the results are in: if people can’t use it easily, many of them won’t.

We believe that people shouldn’t have to make a trade-off between security and ease of use. This is why we’re happy to support Simply Secure, a new organization dedicated to improving the usability and safety of open-source tools that help people secure their online lives.

Over the coming months, Simply Secure will be collaborating with open-source developers, designers, researchers, and others to take what’s there—groundbreaking work from efforts like Open Whisper Systems, The Guardian Project, Off-the-Record Messaging, and more—and work to make them easier to understand and use.

We’re excited for a future where people won’t have to choose between ease and security, and where tools that allow people to secure their communications, content, and online activity are as easy as choosing to use them.

By Meredith Whittaker, Open Source Research Lead and Ben Laurie, Senior Staff Security Engineer

gcloud-node – a Google Cloud Platform Client Library for Node.js

Mary Radomile — Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:41:00 +0000

Today we are announcing a new category of client libraries that has been built specifically for Google Cloud Platform. The very first library, gcloud-node, is idiomatic and intuitive for Node.js developers. With today’s release, you can begin integrating Cloud Datastore and Cloud Storage into your Node.js applications, with more Cloud Platform APIs and programming languages planned.

The easiest way to get started is by installing the gcloud package using npm:

$ npm install gcloud

With gcloud installed, your Node.js code is simpler to write, easier to read, and cleaner to integrate with your existing Node.js codebase. Take a look at the code required to retrieve entities from Datastore:

var gcloud = require('gcloud');

var dataset = new gcloud.datastore.Dataset({
projectId: 'my-project',
keyFilename: '/path/to/keyfile.json' // Details at 
              //https://github.com/googlecloudplatform/gcloud-node#README
});

dataset.get(dataset.key('Product', 123), function(err, entity) {
console.log(err, entity);
});

gcloud is open-sourced on Github; check out the code, file issues and contribute a PR - contributors are welcome. Got questions? Post them on StackOverflow with the [gcloud-node] tag. Learn more about the Client Library for Node.js at http://googlecloudplatform.github.io/gcloud-node/ and try gcloud-node today.

-Posted by JJ Geewax, Software Engineer

Node.js is a trademark of Joyent, Inc. and npm is a trademark of npm, Inc.

CausalImpact: A new open-source package for estimating causal effects in time series

Mary Radomile — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:00:00 +0000

How can we measure the number of additional clicks or sales that an AdWords campaign generated? How can we estimate the impact of a new feature on app downloads? How do we compare the effectiveness of publicity across countries?

In principle, all of these questions can be answered through causal inference.

In practice, estimating a causal effect accurately is hard, especially when a randomised experiment is not available. One approach we've been developing at Google is based on Bayesian structural time-series models. We use these models to construct a synthetic control — what would have happened to our outcome metric in the absence of the intervention. This approach makes it possible to estimate the causal effect that can be attributed to the intervention, as well as its evolution over time.

We've been testing and applying structural time-series models for some time at Google. For example, we've used them to better understand the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and work out their return on investment. We've also applied the models to settings where a randomised experiment was available, to check how similar our effect estimates would have been without an experimental control.

Today, we're excited to announce the release of CausalImpact, an open-source R package that makes causal analyses simple and fast. With its release, all of our advertisers and users will be able to use the same powerful methods for estimating causal effects that we've been using ourselves.

Our main motivation behind creating the package has been to find a better way of measuring the impact of ad campaigns on outcomes. However, the CausalImpact package could be used for many other applications involving causal inference. Examples include problems found in economics, epidemiology, or the political and social sciences.

How the package works
The CausalImpact R package implements a Bayesian approach to estimating the causal effect of a designed intervention on a time series. Given a response time series (e.g., clicks) and a set of control time series (e.g., clicks in non-affected markets, clicks on other sites, or Google Trends data), the package constructs a Bayesian structural time-series model with a built-in spike-and-slab prior for automatic variable selection. This model is then used to predict the counterfactual, i.e., how the response metric would have evolved after the intervention if the intervention had not occurred.

As with all methods in causal inference, valid conclusions require us to check for any given situation whether key model assumptions are fulfilled. In the case of CausalImpact, we are looking for a set of control time series which are predictive of the outcome time series in the pre-intervention period. In addition, the control time series must not themselves have been affected by the intervention. For details, see Brodersen et al. (2014).

A simple example
The figure below shows an application of the R package. Based on the observed data before the intervention (black) and a control time series (not shown), the model has computed what would have happened after the intervention at time point 70 in the absence of the intervention (blue).

The difference between the actual observed data and the prediction during the post-intervention period is an estimate of the causal effect of the intervention. The first panel shows the observed and predicted response on the original scale. The second panel shows the difference between the two, i.e., the causal effect for each point in time. The third panel shows the individual causal effects added up in time.

The script used to create the above figure is shown in the left part of the window below. Using package defaults means our analysis boils down to just a single line of code: a call to the function CausalImpact() in line 10. The right-hand side of the window shows the resulting numeric output. For details on how to customize the model, see the documentation.

How to get started
The best place to start is the package documentation. The package is hosted on Github and can be installed using:

install.packages("devtools")
library(devtools)
devtools::install_github("google/CausalImpact")
library(CausalImpact)

By Kay H. Brodersen, Google

Software Freedom Conservancy and Google Summer of Code

Mary Radomile — Thu, 04 Sep 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Today’s guest post comes from Bradley Kuhn, President of Software Freedom Conservancy. Conservancy and Google Summer of Code have had a long history as partners and in many cases Conservancy has made it possible for organizations to participate in our program. Read on for more details on how becoming a member of Conservancy can benefit your project in Google Summer of Code and beyond.

Software Freedom Conservancy, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit charity that serves as a home to Open Source and Free Software projects. In this post I'd like to discuss what that means and why such projects need a non-profit home. In short, Conservancy seeks to makes the lives of Free Software developers easier and it gives contributors much less administrative work to do outside of their area of focus (i.e., software development and documentation).

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a great example to show the value a non-profit home brings to Free Software projects. GSoC is likely the largest philanthropic program in the Open Source and Free Software community today. However, one of the most difficult things for organizations who seek to take advantage of such programs is the necessary administrative overhead. Google invests heavily in making it easy for organizations to participate in the program (for instance, by handling the details of stipend payments to students directly). However, to take full advantage of any philanthropic program, the benefiting organization has some work to do. For its member projects, Conservancy is the organization that gets that logistical work done.

Google donates $500 to the mentoring organizations for every student it mentors. However, these funds need to go somewhere. If the funds go to an individual, there are two inherent problems. First, that individual is responsible for taxes on that income. Second, funds belonging to an organization as a whole are now in the bank account of a single project leader. Conservancy solves both those problems. As a tax-exempt charity, the mentor payments are available for organizational use under its tax exemption. Furthermore, Conservancy maintains earmarked funds for each of its projects. Conservancy keeps the mentor funds for the Free Software project, and the project leaders can later vote to make use of the funds in a manner that helps the project and Conservancy's charitable mission. Often times, projects in Conservancy use these funds to send developers to important conferences to speak about the project and recruit new developers and users.

Google also offers to pay travel expenses for two mentors from each mentoring organization to attendGSoC Mentor Summit. Conservancy handles this work on behalf of its member projects in two directions. First, for developers who don't have a credit card or otherwise are unable to pay for their own flight and receive reimbursement later, our staff book the flights on Conservancy's credit card. For the other travelers, Conservancy handles the reimbursement details. And on the back end, we handle all the overhead issues in requesting the POs from Google, invoicing for the funds, and tracking to ensure payment is made.
the annual

GSoC coordination is just one of the many things that Conservancy does every day for its member projects. If there's anything other than software development and documentation that you can imagine a project needs, Conservancy does that job for its member projects. This includes not only mundane items such as travel coordination, but also issues as complex as trademark filings and defense, copyright licensing advice and enforcement, governance coordination and mentoring, and fundraising for the projects. Some of Conservancy's member projects have been so successful that they've been able to fund developers’ salaries — often part-time but occasionally full-time — for many years to allow them to focus on improving the project's software for the public benefit.

If your project seeks help with regards to handling its GSoC funds and travel, or anything else mentioned on Conservancy's list of services to member projects, Conservancy is welcoming new applications for membership. Your project could join Conservancy's more than thirty other member projects and receive these important services to help your community grow and focus on its core mission of building software for the public good.

By Bradley M. Kuhn, President, Software Freedom Conservancy

Glide 3.0: a media management library for Android

Mary Radomile — Tue, 02 Sep 2014 20:04:00 +0000

Today we are happy to announce the first stable release of Glide 3.0. Glide is an open source media management framework for Android that wraps media decoding, memory and disk caching, and resource pooling into a simple and easy to use interface.

Glide is specifically designed not only to be easy to use, but also to make scrolling lists of images as smooth and pleasant to use as possible. To reduce stuttery scrolling in lists caused by garbage collections due to Bitmap allocations, Glide uses reference counting behind the scenes to track and reuse Bitmap objects. To maximize the number of Bitmaps that are re-used, Glide includes a Bitmap pool capable of pooling arbitrary sizes of Bitmaps.

The 3.0 version of Glide includes a number of improvements, including support for animated GIF and video still decoding, improved lifecycle integration to intelligently pause and restart requests, and thumbnailing support.

Despite all of the new features, Glide’s interface is still simple and easy to use. To display an image, video still, or animated GIF in a view, you still need only one line:

Glide.with(context).load("http://goo.gl/h8qOq7").into(yourImageView);

Glide will intelligently determine the type of media you’re trying to load, decode it, and return a drawable object that can display the animation or still image in the view. If you want to load specifically a Bitmap, you can do that too:

Glide.with(context).load("http://goo.gl/h8qOq7").asBitmap().into(yourImageView);

You can also do more complex transformations. For example, to upload the bytes of a 250px by 250px profile photo for a user:

Glide.with(context)
.load("/user/profile/photo/path")
.asBitmap()
.toBytes()
.centerCrop()
.into(new SimpleTarget(250, 250) {
@Override
public void onResourceReady(byte[] data, GlideAnimation anim) {
// Post your bytes to a background thread and upload them here.
}
});

For a more complete list of changes, documentation, or to report issues please see the Github page. To see Glide being used in a real application, check out the recently released source of the 2014 Google I/O app and their excellent blog post on image loading. Finally, for questions, comments, or suggestions please join our discussion list.

By Sam Judd, Google Engineering

New Google Summer of Code Organizations – Final post

Mary Radomile — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Today marks the final post in our series highlighting new Google Summer of Code organizations for 2014. Organization administrators from BioJavaScript, Julia and GNU Octave discuss their students’ projects below.

BioJavaScript (BioJS) is an open source library and standard for visualization of biological data on the web. BioJS provides widgets (a pre-made piece of code that performs a task needed in lab software) that can be easily reused, combined and extended, following a common architecture and documentation. BioJS is great for labs with few resources to be able to reutilize, find and share existing functionality.

For Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2014, our students worked on a series of widgets such as a taxonomy viewer that is zoomable at different resolutions and a phylogenetic tree viewer that displays proteins in a tree and branches according to their evolutionary proximity.

By Manuel Corpas, Organization Administrator for BioJS

-----------------------

Julia is a new dynamic programming language aimed primarily at technical computing. It is designed to be both high-level and high-performance, thus replacing the need to have separate languages to achieve these goals. Development on Julia started in 2009 and the project has since become a global collaboration—over 250 collaborators around the world have written close to 20,000 lines of code in the core Julia repository alone.

2014 marks our first time participating in Google Summer of Code and our three students have finished up their highly successful projects:

Simon Danisch is working on volumetric, particle and surface visualizations entirely in Julia and OpenGL. He has been blogging about his progress and all his code is available here on GitHub.
Mikes Innes is building a Julia environment on top of the excellent Light Table platform. It will support building big projects in small steps by modifying them as they are running. It tightly integrates tools such as the profiler and the upcoming documentation and debugging systems, with the aim of being accessible for novices and powerful for seasoned Julians. His work is available through the LightTable plugin manager as well as on GitHub.
Shashi Gowda is working on making use of the recently added real-time interaction support in IJulia notebooks. It will allow users to create widgets including sliders, drop-downs, colorpickers and other input elements in their notebooks and connect them to plots, DataFrames and other output. As part of this work he has also been working on React.jl, an Elm-inspired reactive-programming package for Julia. His code is available on GitHub.

By Keno Fischer, Organization Administrator for Julia

--------------------

GNU Octave is a high-level interpreted programming language primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a command-line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with MATLAB.

We are excited to have three GSoC students who worked with us this summer. Their projects include:

Improving finite element modeling capabilities through an interface to FEniCS
Adding incomplete matrix factorization capabilities
Improving the handling of sparse matrices

By Carlos Fernandez, Organization Administrator for GNU Octave

Tips and tricks from a Google Summer of Code veteran

Mary Radomile — Wed, 27 Aug 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Today we have guest writer Victoria Martínez de la Cruz providing her take on how to have a successful Google Summer of Code. Victoria just finished her summer working with OpenStack, an open source tool for building private and public clouds. Read below for some of her great tips on how to conquer the summer as a GSoC student.

The end of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is near and I wanted to share with readers my perception of what it takes to participate in GSoC, to work in an open source environment and what to expect after the program.

What it takes
Participating in GSoC will allow you to learn about the latest technologies and to contribute to the open source organization project of your choice. Every project is different, so any previous knowledge you should have and tools you are expected to use depend on the project plans.You don't need to be a hacker, but in my opinion, it really helps to have deep understanding of several computer science concepts.

The learning curve can be high. It really helps to become familiar with the project code—discover where things are located and how they interact to make the application work ahead of time. You also will have to become familiar with the programming style of the community. Every organization has its conventions and it’s important to stick to good practices to guarantee high quality code. Students are required to understand the workflow, including how to submit your code for review, how the review process works and what is required to get it merged. Finally, you have to start working on your specific project— sometimes a bit harder than you might think!

It’s important to be proactive and take initiative. Research things you don't understand and collect as many resources as you can to make your own decisions. It is better to be wrong about something and fix it with the feedback submitted by the reviewers than to waste time poking people to ask their opinion on a subject they may not be so familiar with.

Working with a mentor
I want to emphasize how important it is to find a good mentor and to get along with them. It is essential that you share with them both what you feel good about and what is making you nuts! Given that GSoC is a remote program, it is always a good idea to keep your mentor up to speed on what you are doing. Otherwise they cannot track your efforts and they won't notice if you are stuck on something.

Seek to find a good balance—contact your mentor often, but don't expect them to devote all of their time to you. And don’t forget about taking advantage of the developer community. If your mentor cannot reply to your questions for some reason, you can also ask someone else.

What to expect after GSoC
Once you have walked down the GSoC path, you have several options. You can stop contributing to the project you worked on and continue with something else that you like more, you can keep contributing as a volunteer, or you can try to find a full-time job to keep working on it. What you decide to do is up to you, but at the very least you have built a strong background that will be useful in your career.

In short

GSoC is an incredible opportunity. You will learn about programming tools and practices used in real world deployments, and you will build the experience and confidence necessary for a future job. It is really worth the effort!
Become familiar with the project before the summer starts. If you can get in touch with the project community and contribute with a small fix, it will make it easier for you to apply later to GSoC.
Share as much as possible with your mentor. Interact with the community. Get to know them, it's important. Open source projects work because of their communities.
Your contributions are as important as other people's. Review other people’s patches and submit feedback. You will not only learn a lot, but they will be more likely to review your patches.

By Victoria Martinez de la Cruz, Google Summer of Code Student, 2014

10th Year of Google Summer of Code draws to a close

Mary Radomile — Tue, 26 Aug 2014 22:00:00 +0000

This has been a big year for Google Summer of Code, our program designed to introduce university students from around the world to open source development. In celebration of our 10th instance of the program we made a lot of changes.

In April, we accepted more students than we ever have before: 1,307 university students from 72 countries. We raised the stipend for them: the successful participants were paid $5,500 over the course of the program. These students wrote code for the largest number of open source organizations we’ve ever had participate: 190. And last but not least, we had 2491 mentors from 78 countries help them out. We are excited to announce that 89.7%* (1172) of the students passed their final evaluations. To see more about how that compares to previous years, check out our statistics from the last nine years of the program.

And we’re not done yet. This October we’ll be hosting a 10-year reunion in San Jose, California. We’ll welcome our alumni (students, mentors, and organization administrators) from all years of the program to meet and exchange ideas.

Now that this year’s program has concluded, students are busy preparing their code samples for all eyes to see. Soon you will be able to go to the program site where organizations will have links to the students’ code repositories.

Thank you to all of the students, mentors and organization administrators that have helped to make this 10th year of the Google Summer of Code a great success!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Programs

* This number could change slightly in the next few weeks

The Sahana Software Foundation annual conference

Mary Radomile — Thu, 21 Aug 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Today we have a post from Michael Howden, Google Summer of Code mentor since 2010, contributor to the Sahana Open Source Disaster Management Software and as of June 2014 CEO of the Sahana Software Foundation. Sahana recently held it’s annual conference in Sri Lanka, bringing contributors together from around the globe.

The Sahana Software Foundation helps organizations and communities prepare for and respond to disasters by providing open source information management tools. There is not much overlap between the people engaged in disaster management activities using our software and the people who contribute code to it, so it’s important to ensure that our contributors see how their code supports our mission of helping organizations and communities. This is especially important while working with students during Google Summer of Code (GSoC)—and is often hard to do over the mailing list or a Hangout—so we wanted to bring them to the Sahara Annual Conference in Sri Lanka. The conference was sponsored by Google, AidIQ, Virtusa, The University of Colombo School of Computing and LIRNEAsia which made it possible for the following GSoC mentors and students to attend:

Arnav Agrawal
Fran Boon
Ramindu Deshapriya
Michael Howden
Somay Jain
Mayank Jain
Dominic König
Gaurav Narula
Arnav Sharma
Hemant Singh
Nuwan Waidyanatha

The Sahana Annual Conference consisted of a number of separate events which were being held in parallel with the Indian Ocean Tsunami 10th Anniversary convention (IOTX). This gave the students broad exposure to the Sahana community, users, history, strategy, and of course the code of our open source project.

The main event of the week was the SahanaCamp workshop. These workshops are conducted to help encourage collaboration between coders and disaster management experts. Our students were very impressed to learn about all the places around the world where Sahana was used. It occurred to me that we need to improve our introduction documents so students can have this information before they start work on their projects. One of the highlights of the day for me was having our students give demonstrations of Sahana to people from various disaster management organisations who were attending the SahanaCamp. I was really impressed with their knowledge and professionalism.

There was no way we could get everyone together without cranking out some code— the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) Code-Fest was a great opportunity for this. A number of CAP experts had been consulted and were also present to work with the Sahana Team. During the day our mentors and students were able to work together to implement new support for sharing alert messages between organizations.

The week wrapped up with our Annual General Meeting, during which we held a number of unconference sessions allowing us to dive into a number of really important areas:

Debugging with Eclipse and Firebug. It was a surprise how few of our students knew about using these tools (for example, print statements != debugging), another addition for us to make to our introduction documents.
We held a session looking at our GSoC program and how we could improve it. Everyone agreed that face-to-face meetings were valuable and more structured meetings could be useful, especially if they connected students with the end users. We also talked about the value of allowing students to set their own priorities and having ownership over their projects.

The conference allowed our students to see that there is much more to open source than what they saw on their computer screens. But more importantly it gave them a chance to come together, see the bigger picture they are a part of, meet each other face to face, build relationships and make friendships.

“Open source is nothing but a few people with a common goal working together for the betterment of a community by developing software. This I saw in person and this will stick with me for the rest of my life.”
-Arnav Sharma

If you’re interested in finding out more about the conference, please take a look at the blog posts prepared by our students!

By Michael Howden, CEO, Sahana Software Foundation

Melange: the open source software powering Google Summer of Code

Mary Radomile — Mon, 18 Aug 2014 19:05:00 +0000

Daniel Hans, a long time Melange developer, is today’s guest writer. Below he describes a bit about the open source software that makes Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in possible year after year.

There is no Google Summer of Code (GSoC) without Melange, the open source software both GSoC and Google Code-in (GCI) run on. The first release in 2009 was a real game changer for both program administrators and participants. Can you believe that in the pre-Melange era we once ran the program with almost 1,000 students on just a spreadsheet?

But what exactly is Melange? In short, it is a website front end to the database we use to both present information about GSoC and manage the participation of all the projects, mentors and students involved. Melange is a project that supports open source initiatives. Not surprisingly, it is open source itself and has participated as an organization in GSoC from its infancy.

The project was started in 2008 and developed primarily by a group of volunteers who dedicated a considerable amount of time so that it could be deployed one short year later. In the early days of Melange, the user interface was very simple. It visualized the underlying database layer with minimum graphics. Despite its simplicity and initial shortcomings it was a breakthrough, as a lot of tasks which previously had been completed manually became automated. The program could now continue to grow and scale with each year. By 2011 the layout was completely redesigned to provide a much better user experience. Since launch, almost 40,000 student proposals have been processed through Melange.

This summer we chose four students to work on Melange as a GSoC project and three successfully passed the midterm evaluation. They have all been working hard on projects that will have a real impact on both GSoC and GCI. At the end of the summer we should be able to resolve several high priority issues requested by our users.

Shikher Somal is improving the general workflow of a student participant. For example, student applicants will be able to rank their proposals in order of their own preferences. They will no longer have to rely on the organizations they applied with and program administrators to decide who gets to work with the student (which often occurs when multiple orgs like the same student).

Denys Butenko from Ukraine is working on CSS improvements to make the user interface more responsive. The new UI will look much cleaner on different screen sizes, especially on mobile devices where so much traffic is coming from these days.

Our third participant, Piyush Bansal, is helping to make the Melange developer’s life a bit easier. Piyush successfully completed his first GSoC project in 2013 and has since become an important part of our community since then. This summer he is working on a continuous integration system. His changes are not directly visible to end users but are crucial to our daily workflow. We recently pushed to production a first release for which the developer did not need to run all the tests manually as a part of the deployment process. The buildbot did the job for him.

The summer has been going great and we are really excited about all the work so far. We have already integrated some parts of the students’ projects into the master branch. Is there any better evidence that a GSoC student can make an actual impact? And we are always happy to welcome new contributors. If you would like to make Melange even better, please start by reading the getting started guide. Feel free to get in touch with us on our mailing list.

By Daniel Hans, Google, Melange Developer

Google Summer of Code new organizations – Part Seven

Mary Radomile — Fri, 15 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000

We have two additional Google Summer of Code organizations to spotlight this week, TEAMMATES and Tatoeba. Both are new to the program in 2014. Read below for details about the exciting projects their students have taken on this summer.

TEAMMATES is an online feedback management tool for education. It is a not-for-profit project based at the National University of Singapore and funded by education grants. While TEAMMATES-the-service is offered as a free SaaS to the public, TEAMMATES-the-project is primarily a student project that aims to train students in building non-trivial software systems. Currently TEAMMATES contains the work of over 100 students and is used by both teachers and students from over 100 universities.TEAMMATES is a JavaEE application running on Google App Engine.

In GSoC 2014, we have 4 students—Gu Junchao, Low WeiLin, Thyagesh Manikandan, and Xie Kai are each adding new major features to TEAMMATES.

Junchao is adding fine-grain access control to enable variable access levels to different instructors for the same course.
WeiLin is adding the ability to see statistics for responses collected in feedback sessions
Thyagesh is adding the function for students to create user profiles within TEAMMATES
Xie Kai working on a feature for instructors to comment on students, teams, and feedback responses submitted

By Damith Rajapakse, Organization administrator for TEAMMATES

----------------------------

Tatoeba is a platform that aims to build a large database of sentences and their translations into as many languages as possible. The initial idea was to have a tool in which you could search certain words, and it would return example sentences containing these words with their translations in the desired languages. The name Tatoeba resulted from this concept, because "tatoeba" means "for example" in Japanese.

Anyone can contribute to add new sentences and translations. The data collected is redistributed under the CC-BY license.

Our organization is mentoring 4 GSoC students this year:

Jake, working on an export to Anki deck. The application will take an Anki deck from the user, compare it against Tatoeba's database, and generate a new deck with sentences where the user will know one new word
Pallav, working on administrative scripts. The project's main aim is to create scripts that simplify the task of setting up a development/production environment for Tatoeba, along a few supporting scripts that can perform backup, restore, export, import, etc
Saeb, working on a Python rewrite of Tatoeba. We hope that the resulting prototype will be the foundation for the next and better version of Tatoeba, with awesome new feature
Harsh, working on a mass import system for open texts. This will be a boost for the database because the system will not import just any sentence. It will have to evaluate what is a good sentence to meet the Tatoeba community's need for high quality.

By Trang Ho, Organization Administrator for Tatoeba

My Google Summer of Code journey: From student, to mentor, to organization administrator

Mary Radomile — Wed, 13 Aug 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Today’s post comes from guest blogger Ana Cutillas — a dedicated Google Summer of Code student, mentor, and now organization administrator for Systers, a forum for women involved in the technical aspects of computing. The email list has over 4,000 members from at least 54 countries around the world. Ana is passionate about all things open source and shares a bit of her story below.

A few years ago, a friend told me about a cool open source program called Google Summer of Code (GSoC). I was reluctant to get involved — I had no idea where to start! But when the organizations for GSoC 2012 were made public, I felt ready. I skimmed through the list and one of them caught my eye. Systers. Funny name. I read more about them: an international electronic mailing list for technical women in computing. Awesome! I decided to apply and before I knew it, I was a full time student, full-time worker, an Ultimate Frisbee player and applying to become a GSoC participant. Needless to say, I was quite busy.

For the application, Systers required that you install their environment in your machine and fix a bug for them. It wasn't easy. I had so many questions! Thankfully I had already joined the Systers' developers mailing list and I decided to ask them. At the beginning, mentors-to-be answered my questions but eventually new potential students joined the list and I knew the answers to some of their questions. It felt great to be able to help people already.

I finished my application before the deadline and I got feedback from Systers that helped me make it better. They told me that GSoC wasn’t compatible with having a full time job (they were right, it definitely isn't). They suggested I should either volunteer my time and have someone mentor me outside of the program, or leave my job and apply to be an official GSoC student. I didn't have to give it much thought—I left the job I didn't like for the possibility of an awesome summer.

Throughout the application process, I became friends with another student that wanted to work with Systers too. The night of the accepted students announcement, we were both so nervous. I remember walking back home from my Ultimate Frisbee practice when she told me she had gotten the email. I had a rush of mixed emotions, I was so happy for her but worried about where mine was. Maybe I hadn't made it? After several of the longest minutes of my life, there it was! I made it!

Systers set me up with two mentors. During the community bonding period we went through my summer schedule until we were all happy with it. The coding period started and I dived head first into my project. I spent my summer working in Python, and learning about open source project etiquette and culture. When I didn't know where to find the files I needed to do something, I could ask my senior mentor and she just knew. I feel very fortunate to have worked with her and I still turn to her for career advice.

A few months after GSoC ended, I got an email from our administrator to the mailing list saying that Systers was going to try to participate in GSoC again that year (in 2013). I immediately wrote her back and told her that I would like to be a mentor. I was really nervous about being a mentor, a lot more than I was when I was a student. As a student you’re just expected to get your work done, ask questions and slowly become part of the community. However, as a mentor, I was expected to be a role model. I had such an amazing experience with my mentor and I really wanted to provide the same experience to my student.

All my worries went away as soon as I met my student. As far as students go, I hit the jackpot! She was extremely smart, really organized, got her work done on time and was absolutely fantastic to work with.

Later in the year I was chosen to go to the mentor summit at the Google campus in California. There, I got to meet some of the people that had mentored me when I was a student. The summit has truly been one of the best experiences of my life. It was so cool to be surrounded by tons of exceptionally smart people who were also really passionate about open source.

Shortly after the summit, our administrator asked me if I wanted to help out as an org admin as well as be a mentor for 2014 GSoC. I didn’t have to think about it, I happily accepted. I’m happy to report our organization has grown a lot in a year. We’ve gone from six to 14 students and we’ve been able to recruit about four mentors per student. And what a ride I’ve been on. I’m excited to continue my work with Systers and can’t wait to see what’s next for Google Summer of Code.

By Ana Cutillas, Google Summer of Code Student, Mentor, and Organization Administrator for Systers

Google Summer of Code new organizations – Part Six

Mary Radomile — Fri, 08 Aug 2014 17:00:00 +0000

We have two great new Google Summer of Code organizations to spotlight this week, The Institute of Artificial Intelligence and Frenetic. It’s hard to believe that the summer has almost come to an end! The coding period for GSoC ends on Monday, August 18.

The Institute of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Bremen in Germany investigates methods for cognition-enabled robot control. The research is at the intersection of robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and includes methods for intelligent perception, dexterous object manipulation, plan-based robot control, and knowledge representation for robots.

Robots performing complex tasks in open domains, such as assisting humans in a household or collaboratively assembling products in a factory, need to have cognitive capabilities for interpreting their sensor data, understanding scenes, selecting and parameterizing their actions, recognizing and handling failures and interacting with humans.

In our first year in Google Summer of Code (GSoC), we have students working on three distinct projects from our core research competences:

Mihai Baltac is working on the development of situation-specific simulation environments in the Gazebo robot simulator. On the basis of an existing plan library in the CRAM system, he will also develop robot plans that enable robotic agents to operate in this environment in a knowledge-supported, robust fashion.
Andrei-Mihai Nicolae is improving the visualization of the belief state and the intentions of the cognitive agent. He’s further developing the Bullet physics engine based reasoning system of CRAM.
Razvan-Andrei Stoica is extending the geometric reasoning capabilities of the KnowRob CAD reasoning system. He will introduce new attributes that can be extracted from physical properties of a known object model, and will work on further refining the current algorithms.

By Jan Winkler, Institute for Artificial Intelligence

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Frenetic is an open source software-defined networking controller platform. With Frenetic, a programmer can describe the intended behavior of the network in a high-level language, and the compiler and run-time system generates the low-level code that executes on network devices.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an emerging network architecture in which a logically-centralized controller manages the behavior of a collection of programmable switches, such as OpenFlow switches. SDN can simplify many network algorithms, and it also makes it easy to extend the network with new functionality. Most SDN controller platforms provide low-level programming interfaces that closely mirror the capabilities of the underlying hardware.

Frenetic is unique in that it provides a high-level and declarative programming interface that abstracts away from the details of the hardware and allows programmers to focus on the essential features of network applications.

We are very excited to have a Google Summer of Code student this year. He is working hard designing and implementing support for versions 1.3 and 1.4 of the OpenFlow protocol.

By Marco Canini, Frenetic Organization Administrator

Google Summer of Code new organizations – Part Five

Mary Radomile — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 19:00:00 +0000

We have two additional Google Summer of Code organizations to spotlight this week, LabLua and Code Combat. Both are new to the program in 2014. Read below for more information about the exciting projects their students have taken on this summer.

LabLua is a lab at PUC-Rio dedicated to research on programming languages with an emphasis on the Lua language. Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language that has been used in many industrial applications, and on many embedded systems and games.

It is our first year in Google Summer of Code (GSoC). We had eight mentors create a pool of 15 projects to help students to submit proposals. We received a total of 20 proposals, from which four have been accepted. We are quite an international group — two of the accepted students are from Brazil, one is from Romania and one is from India.

The projects our students are currently working on include:

Adding flow typing and evolution of table types to typed Lua
Adding multi-CPU support to VLC
Creating a library to help 'memory leak' detection in Lua
Porting Gameduino demos to the programming language Céu (another language currently under development at our lab)

By Ana Lúcia de Moura and Francisco Sant'Anna, Researchers at LabLua

----------------------

CodeCombat is a game that teaches people to code. It runs completely in HTML5 and supports playing in JavaScript, Coffeescript, Python, Lua, Clojure, Io, and more to come. Since open sourcing the site in January, we've been very happy with the huge response from people who provide code improvements, experimental game levels and extensive translations to the site. Almost every aspect of the game is available for contributors to work on, and GSoC has been terrific in bringing not only attention to our project but also many dedicated volunteers as well.

Alexandru Caciulescu is building new game levels throughout the summer. His campaign focuses on teaching intermediate-to-advanced concepts and algorithms, such as sorting, recursion and data structures. He has already built the Gold Rush level which requires efficient pathfinding, and which we based our own Greed Tournament level on.

Jayant Jain is working on improving our level editor. Building new levels is currently quite hard, arguably the most difficult thing for any contributor to do. Jayant is running UX tests and working with Alexandru and other level builders to remove pain points, fix bugs, add key features and create helpful documentation.

Dominik Kundel is doing a series of projects on the game interface which will improve gameplay in general and mobile gameplay in particular. Projects include auto-complete, separation of coding and game views and interfaces for manipulating code easily on mobile.

Ruben Vereecken is building the site's achievement system from top to bottom. It uses an experimental, highly decoupled and flexible foundation that is largely independent from the client logic. He's also digging into several other parts of the site, such as the testing systems and making server-side improvements.

By Scott Erikson, Organization Administrator for Code Combat

Google Code-in: sixteen and counting

Mary Radomile — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Today we have a guest post from Chirayu Desai, one of the twenty amazing teenagers from around the globe who took top honors in Google Code-in 2013. Read more about Chirayu and his introduction into the world of open source software below.

If I told you a 16 year-old kid could work on software which runs on millions of devices, contribute to an operating system which is present on more than a billion devices, and work on code that goes into spacecraft, would you believe it?

Believe it! I am that very 16 year-old writing this blog post three months after visiting the Googleplex in California (a long-time dream) as one of the 20 grand prize winners of Google Code-in 2013 (GCI). Check me out on a Segway! I’m the one on the right.

I first read about GCI online, and I immediately decided to participate. I felt that it was the perfect opportunity for me to not only get involved in an open source project but also get to know new people. I chose RTEMS because I liked their hello world task — it involved setting up a development environment for RTEMS, compiling a test program, and running it in a simulator.

So what is involved when completing tasks for GCI? It isn’t just about writing code, but also really understanding the code and contributing back to it. While working with an open source organization, you have to ensure that the code quality meets the project’s guidelines. The code must be as accurate and efficient as possible — no quick hacks here.

As an open source contributor, I worked with version control systems (they’re awesome, really), mailing lists (old school, but still effective) and code review systems. I then got feedback from my mentors, applied it, rinsed and repeated. The exciting part wasn’t just the coding process, but everything associated with working on such a project. I wrote the code, wrote tests for the code, read and closed bug reports, collaborated with other people, etc. It’s much more in depth than what I would experience with a personal project and I learned a ton!

As a high school student you may have worked on a personal project in your spare time, or maybe you even know a few coding languages. But I believe working with open source projects and participating in GCI gives you much more. I now know that when I get a job one day, I won’t just have to write code, I’ll also have to get it reviewed, and review other people’s code. This is not something you learn by working on personal projects, but by working collaboratively — something I practiced and refined by participating in GCI. In addition, the mentors assigned to help students were very supportive would help us students with everything that we needed which was really encouraging.

I really enjoyed participating in the contest. Even though I had worked on open source software before, my Google Code-in experience was completely different from anything I’d ever done. Flying halfway across the world and getting to meet the people with whom I had worked was something I didn’t imagine would ever happen. Every 13-17 year old pre-university student has the opportunity to participate in GCI, you just need to take that first step. Then you too can be a part of something that could change your life — I know it changed mine.

By Chirayu Desai, Google Code-in Grand Prize Winner, 2013

Are you interested in participating in Google Code-in this year? Keep an eye on the program website for important dates and information.

Google Summer of Code new organizations – Part Four

Mary Radomile — Fri, 25 Jul 2014 19:00:00 +0000

For the 4th post in our Google Summer of Code series highlighting the new open source organizations participating in this year’s program, we welcome administrators from jMonkeyEngine and BuildmLearn to describe their students’ projects.

jMonkeyEngine (JME3) is a modern 3D engine written entirely in Java. The full SDK comes bundled with industry-standard editing tools and an ever-growing library of plugins contributed by the community. The engine can publish to all PC platforms including Android and iOS.

This is our first year participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and we are very excited about it. All our mentors are jME3 veterans, two of whom are from the core team and one is a long time trusted contributor. As for our students, they never cease to impress. Below are descriptions of the projects they are working on this summer.

Smooth Voxel Terrains, by John
jMonkeyEngine has become very popular among voxel game creators. John is exploring techniques such as dual marching cubes which might very well be the precursor to a next-gen Minecraft. We hope his work can serve as a starting point for similarly ambitious developers.

Cinematic Editor, by Mayank
We have an SDK with a lot of potential, but still need some flagship plugins to show developers what it's really capable of. Mayank has taken on the task of creating a comprehensive cinematic editor which will enable game developers to create cutscenes in a snap, all within a comfortable GUI.

Recast Navigation Integration, by Tihomir
Game AI is an incredibly difficult thing to get right for the masses, but luckily we have access to the Recast Navigation AI. Tihomir is creating Recast Navigation bindings and adjusting them to jME3 — a task which is easier said than done (jME3 is Java and Recast is C++). We're confident he is up to the challenge!

This year we also made our first attempt at a community-sponsored summer of code, for which we secured another four incredibly promising students. Albeit at a more relaxed schedule, they will follow along the GSoC schedule and take advantage of our support network just the same. If all goes well, we will have seven shiny new projects once the summer cools off.

By Erlend Sogge Heggen, Organization Administrator for jMonkeyEngine
----------------------

BuildmLearn is a group of volunteers who collaborate to promote mobile learning (m-Learning) with the specific aim of creating open source tools and enablers for teachers and students. The group is involved in developing m-Learning solutions, tool-kits and utilities for teachers, parents and students.

Our current projects include the BuildmLearn Toolkit which is an easy-to-use program that helps users make mobile apps without any knowledge of application development. The toolkit empowers users to create mobile applications with various functionality and custom content. Targeted at teachers, this program helps them make learning fun and engaging through mobile apps. Besides the toolkit, we have mobile application projects focussing on education.

What our students are working on?

This is BuildmLearn's first year in Google Summer of Code and we received a large number of proposals (over 250!) from students all over the world. Three of the best proposals were chosen based on a careful selection process.

- Martin from Czech Republic is working on porting the BuildmLearn Toolkit to Linux, OS/2 and Mac OS X. He has also proposed to work on several enhancements to the toolkit and stabilize the code base.

- Kelvin from Malaysia is working on an educational mobile game called “Tell the time” which teaches children about the concepts of time and date in an interesting manner. Targeted at children 4 to 8 years of age, this mobile game will use an interactive clock and calendar elements to engage the kids.

- Abhishekh from India is working on an interesting mobile application called “Learn from Map” which is focused on teaching geography. Targeted at kids studying in primary schools, this application would use interactive map elements to teach geography and related topics in an informal environment.

BuildmLearn is very excited about being a part of this amazing program and will be happy to showcase the work done by the students as the program progresses.

By Pankaj Nathani, BuildmLearn Organization Administrator

Hot weather, cool code: July Unix User’s Group meeting

Mary Radomile — Tue, 15 Jul 2014 19:29:00 +0000

Unigroup is the oldest and largest Unix User's Group (Unix/Linux/BSD) serving the Greater New York City Regional Area. It has been serving the NYC Unix/BSD Community for over 30 years, and the NYC Linux Community for over 20 years.

Unigroup organizes monthly meetings, each of which contains a main presentation on a wide variety of topics. In this month's event, happening on Thursday, July 17th, 2014, I will present the FreeBSD Test Suite and its backing testing framework, Kyua, both of which are supported by the Google Open Source Programs Office.

Today's blog post features the key concepts behind the FreeBSD Test Suite and what you can expect from Thursday’s meeting. If you are attending, please do not forget to RSVP by July 17th!

The FreeBSD Test Suite
FreeBSD is a Unix-like, free, general purpose operating system with a large codebase — over 5 million lines according to Ohloh. In order to easily ascertain the quality of the system and to ensure that such quality does not regress over time, the foundations of a test suite and a collection of tests were needed.

With funding from a Google Summer of Code project in 2007, I got involved in writing a test suite framework for NetBSD known as ATF, parts of which were rewritten under the Kyua project name starting in 2010. Both ATF and Kyua have always been standalone components able to work on any Unix-like operating system. Until recently, NetBSD was the major consumer of these testing tools, but in 2013 they spilled into FreeBSD to equip the system with its own test suite.

The goals of the FreeBSD Test Suite are to assist developers in modifying the system, to assist end users in validating that the system works according to documented expectations, and to assist the release engineering team in vetting new releases and to put the shiny-new Kyua framework to use in a production-quality project.

Currently, the FreeBSD Test Suite is part of both FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT (the development branch) and of stable/10 (the stable branch that will yield 10.1-RELEASE). The test suite currently holds about 570 test cases — a pretty small number considering its scope, but decent enough given that the test suite foundations are still under active development.

Kyua: the test suite glue
Kyua is a runtime engine for test suites, mostly engineered towards testing operating systems. In general terms, a test suite defines the layout of its test programs and its test cases using a declarative language that Kyua is in charge of. Based on this definition, Kyua allows to execute the tests in a controlled environment and to generate user-friendly and machine-parseable reports of the results. Continuous integration facilities are left to better-suited third-party systems such as Jenkins.

Kyua is able to run test programs implemented in a variety of languages with support for various different testing libraries. In particular, Kyua can run ATF-based test programs (written in either C, C++ or POSIX shell), legacy test programs (those that just exit with 0 or 1 depending on the test's success), and TAP-compliant test programs. It should be possible, and is in fact planned, to support other backends like GoogleTest.

The upcoming talk
In Thursday’s meeting, I will be presenting all of the above and much, much more.

The session will start with a bit of history about my involvement with the BSDs. I’ll talk about the goals of the FreeBSD Test Suite while comparing those with its NetBSD counterpart, presenting the Kyua project, outlining the current state of the test suite, showcasing Jenkins and possibly performing some live demonstrations. Expect code samples.

If you happen to be in the New York City area on the 17th, RSVP and join us for the session!

By Julio Merino, Google Site Reliability Engineering

ZuriHac 2014: Haskell hackathon in Zurich

Mary Radomile — Mon, 30 Jun 2014 21:30:00 +0000

The Google Open Source Programs Office recently co-sponsored a three-day hackathon for Haskell, an open source functional programming language. Johan Tibell from Google’s Zurich office talks more about the event below.

June 6th saw the third installment of ZuriHac, a three-day Haskell hackathon in Zurich, Switzerland. With roughly 100 attendees from all over the world, this was the biggest ZuriHac to date.

In addition to hacking, hallway discussions, a demo session, and impromptu talks on topic ranging from GHC hacking to category theory, there were two one-hour talks. Simon Marlow talked about haxl, a library for automatically parallelization and batching of data requests. Edward Kmett followed with a talk about new and exciting persistent data structures based on cache-oblivious algorithms.

The hacking was all over the map. An entire room was dedicated to teaching newcomers how to hack on GHC, the Haskell compiler. A smaller group of people worked on various improvements to Cabal (the Haskell build system) by improving the dependency solver and making sure that parallel package builds work well. More lighthearted projects included a remake of 1990s cult video game Stunts.

Thanks to sponsorships by Google and Better, a local Haskell startup, we were well fed and had a roof over our heads.

By Johan Tibell, Software Engineer, and ZuriHac organizer

Google Summer of Code new organizations – Part two

Mary Radomile — Fri, 27 Jun 2014 17:00:00 +0000

We have two great new Google Summer of Code organizations to spotlight this week, OpenKeychain and Linaro. It’s hard to believe that we are almost halfway through the coding period for GSoC 2014. Midterm evaluations for both mentors and students are due today, Friday, June 27.

OpenKeychain allows you to manage cryptographic keys and encrypt messages as well as files for your contacts on Android. Our project is focused on providing an easy user interface based on Android design principles. It implements the OpenPGP standard, often referred to as GPG or PGP, and enables a secure end-to-end communication in times of mass surveillance.

As a new organization to Google Summer of Code, we secured two student slots. One of our students will work on a better abstraction between cryptography backend and user interface code, resulting in some unit tests, while also working on a better integration of the OpenPGP web-of-trust. The other student will work on a better integration of OpenKeychain into the Android OS, including better support for file encryption and decryption using Android 4.4 features, integration with Android's contact application, and work on potential improvements for the API.

By Dominik Schürmann, OpenKeychain Organization Administrator

Linaro is the place where engineers from the world's leading technology companies define the future of Linux on ARM. Linaro is a not-for-profit engineering organization with over 200 engineers consolidating and optimizing open source software for the ARM architecture in many areas. We have teams working on the GCC toolchain, the Linux kernel, power management, graphics and multimedia interfaces, networking and more.

This is our first year participating in the Google Summer of Code, and we are welcoming three students to our team. Gaurav Minocha's project is Linux Flattened Device Tree Self-checking, mentored by Grant Likely. Ricardo de Freitas Gesuatto will be working on a project entitled "Lightweight IP Stack on top of OpenDataPlane", mentored by Maxim Uvarov. Finally, Varad Gautam will be Porting UEFI to a Low-Cost Embedded Platform (BeagleBoneBlack), mentored by Leif Lindholm. We're looking forward to seeing how our newest engineers succeed this summer!

By Steve McIntyre, Linaro Organization Administrator

Cayley: graphs in Go

Mary Radomile — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 18:45:00 +0000

Four years ago this July, Google acquired Metaweb, bringing Freebase and linked open data to Google. It’s been astounding to watch the growth of the Knowledge Graph and how it has improved Google search to delight users every day.

When I moved to New York last year, I saw just how far the concepts of Freebase and its data had spread through Google’s worldwide offices. I began to wonder how the concepts would advance if developers everywhere could work with similar tools. However, there wasn’t a graph available that was fast, free, and easy to get started working with.

With the Freebase data already public and universally accessible, it was time to make it useful, and that meant writing some code as a side project.

So today we are excited to release Cayley, an open source graph database.

Cayley is a spiritual successor to graphd; it shares a similar query strategy for speed. While not an exact replica of it’s predecessor, it brings it’s own features to the table:
• RESTful API
• Multiple (modular) backend stores, such as LevelDB and MongoDB
• Multiple (modular) query languages
• Easy to get started
• Simple to build on top of as a library
and of course
• Open Source

Cayley is written in Go, which was a natural choice. As a backend service that depends upon speed and concurrent access, Go seemed like a good fit. Go did not disappoint; with a fantastic standard library and easy access to open source libraries from the community, the necessary building blocks were already there. Combined with Go’s effective concurrency patterns compared to C, creating a performance-competitive successor to graphd became a reality.

To get a sense of Cayley, check out the I/O Bytes video we created where we “Build A Small Knowledge Graph”. The video includes a quick introduction to graph stores as well as an example of processing Freebase and Schema.org linked data.

You can also check out the demo dataset in a live instance running on Google App Engine. It’s running with the sample dataset in the repository — 30,000 movies and their actors, roles, and directors using Freebase film schema. For a more-than-trivial query, try running the following code, both as a query and as a visualization; what you’ll see is the neighborhood of the given actor and how the actors who co-star with that actor interact with each other:

costar =

g.M().In("/film/performance/actor").In("/film/film/starring")

function getCostars(x) {

return g.V(x).As("source").In("name")

.Follow(costar).FollowR(costar)

.Out("name").As("target")

}

function getActorNeighborhood(primary_actor) {

actors = getCostars(primary_actor).TagArray()

seen = {}

for (a in actors) {

g.Emit(actors[a])

seen[actors[a].target] = true

}

seen[primary_actor] = false

actor_list = []

for (actor in seen) {

if (seen[actor]) {

actor_list.push(actor)

}

getCostars(actor_list).Intersect(g.V(actor_list)).ForEach(function(d)
{

if (d.source < d.target) {

g.Emit(d)

}

})

}

getActorNeighborhood("Humphrey Bogart")

To get involved, check out the project on GitHub and join the mailing list. But most importantly, have fun building your own graphs!

By Barak Michener, Software Engineer, Knowledge NYC

Google Summer of Code 2014 midterms are here!

Mary Radomile — Mon, 23 Jun 2014 19:30:00 +0000

This week marks the halfway point of Google Summer of Code 2014. Both students and mentors will be submitting their midterm evaluations of one another through Friday, June 27 as indicated in our timeline. If you would like to read more about these midterm evaluations, please check out the "How Do Evaluations Work?" link on our FAQ.

The next milestone for the program will be the “pencils down” date of August 11 after which students can take a week to scrub their code, write tests, improve calculations and generally polish their work before the firm end of coding on August 18.

There has been fantastic progress made so far, and we encourage all the students, mentors, and org admins to keep up the great work!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code 2014 by the numbers: Part two

Mary Radomile — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Our first “by the numbers” post was about what countries this year’s accepted Google Summer of Code students are from - all 73 countries - which made for a big list. This time we’re serving up a mix of interesting stats in smaller charts.

"How old are the students?"

Google Summer of Code is for students ages 18 and older - but note the lack of an upper limit. While most of the students are relatively young, we also welcome non-traditional students to participate. This year our oldest student is 57.

“Am I the only undergraduate in the program?”
Year after year the majority of GSoC students, more than 50%, are undergraduates, but Master and PhD programs are well represented also. 2014 is no exception.

"How many women are participating in GSoC 2014?"

We are very pleased to report that just over 10% of this year’s accepted students are women. The percentage of female students has been increasing year over year since 2006, but this is the first time we’ve broken the 10% barrier. We are obviously still a very long way from gender parity, but we’re glad this number continues to trend upward.

We will be doing additional posts about the statistics for GSoC 2014 in the next few weeks. If you have questions, please drop us a comment and we’ll do what we can to answer in an upcoming post.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

FlatBuffers: a memory efficient serialization library

Mary Radomile — Mon, 16 Jun 2014 22:00:00 +0000

Today, we are releasing FlatBuffers, a C++ serialization library that allows you to read data without unpacking or allocating additional memory, as an open source project.

FlatBuffers stores serialized data in buffers in a cross-platform way, supporting format evolution that is fully forwards and backwards compatible through a schema. These buffers can be stored in files or sent across the network as-is, and accessed in-place without parsing overhead.

The FlatBuffers schema compiler and runtime is written in platform independent C++ with no library dependencies outside the STL, which makes it possible to use on any platform that has a C++ compiler. We have provided methods to build the FlatBuffers library, example applications, and unit tests for Android, Linux, OSX and Windows.

The schema compiler can generate code to read and write FlatBuffers binary files for C++ and Java. It can additionally parse JSON-formatted data into type-safe binaries.

Game developers can use this library to store game data with less overhead than alternative solutions (e.g. Protocol Buffers or JSON). We’re excited about the possibilities, and want to hear from you about how we can make this even better!

Download the latest release from our github page and join our discussion list!

By Wouter van Oortmerssen, Fun Propulsion Labs at Google*

*Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

My Google Code-in grand prize trip

Mary Radomile — Fri, 13 Jun 2014 20:00:00 +0000

Today’s post comes from Mateusz Maćkowski, one of the 20 grand prize winners of Google Code-in, an open source programming contest for 13-17 year old students. Mateusz came all the way from Poland to California for the trip and details the four days of technical presentations and fun activities the winners took part in.

The Beginning
I first found out that I was a grand prize winner for Google Code-in 2013 (GCI) for the Wikimedia Foundation in the middle of January, about a week after the contest ended. I then had three months for my excitement to build before my trip in April to the United States to meet the other 19 Grand Prize Winners and a mentor from each of the 10 participating open source organizations.

Day 1
The opening meet and greet dinner started the festivities and as we entered the room, we were greeted by Stephanie Taylor, Cat Allman and Mary Radomile, three of the four members of the Google Open Source Programs team responsible for organizing and preparing the contest and trip.

After spending about an hour eating and chatting with other Grand Prize Winners, their family members, and our mentors we received backpacks full of goodies (t-shirts, stickers, notebooks, a jacket, etc.) followed by a short icebreaker game. Each student received a list of personality traits or talents (such as “Can paint”, “Has a dog”, “Can speak fluently three or more languages”, etc.). We each had to find another person who matched the particular description. It was a great way to interact with each of the other students. The winners were the two people who were able to match the largest number of people. After the game, we received more swag, and – a huge surprise to most in the room – Samsung Chromebooks!

Day 2
The next day all 50 of us piled onto a large bus in San Francisco heading to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. When we arrived in Mountain View we cruised around the various buildings of the Google Campus before settling into our large event room for the day.

We started with a brief presentation from Stephanie on various information and statistics about GCI. After that we had our awards ceremony where Chris DiBona, Director of Social Impact and Open Source at Google, gave us each of our awards. Our mentors then presented each of us with a plaque for our achievements. We took tons of individual photos and group shots (just a few of the many to come) and then headed to lunch.

Google employees from all parts of the company and from each of the countries represented by the Grand Prize Winners joined us for lunch. It was great to be able to talk one-on-one with a Polish Googler about their experiences in Silicon Valley. After lunch another Googler spoke about the famous Google self-driving car project.

Next up was a tour of the Google campus. The tour included some of the most recognizable places at the Googleplex, including the Android statues representing each of the Android releases. As you can see, it was a perfect spot for group and individual photos.

After the tour concluded several more Googlers gave talks about their products and services — Google Giving, Google Maps, Chrome and the open source project Samba. The last Googler talking that day was a contributor to Melange, the open source software that Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in is run on. He is a past Google Summer of Code student and has been an active contributor to Melange for several years.

Day 3 – “San Francisco Fun Day”
We spent our third day touring San Francisco. We had the choice between two tours: a Segway tour, or a visit to Alcatraz. I chose the Segway and couldn’t have been more excited. For me, it was one of the best parts of the whole Grand Prize trip.

After the Segway tour it was time to visit the California Academy of Sciences, which is one of the largest natural history museums in the United States.

The last event of the day was a surprise — all we knew was that we’d go on an “adventure”. What an adventure and nice surprise it was! We took a yacht tour in San Francisco Bay under the Golden Gate Bridge and around Angel Island. We spent the evening talking with other students, mentors and several Google employees. Day 3 was just as cool as the previous one.

Day 4
The last day of the 2013 GCI Grand Prize trip took place at the Google office in San Francisco. It was a nice and easy walk from our hotel to the office along San Francisco’s Embarcadero which is a large walkway along the waterfront. There was a breakfast buffet waiting for us, and because it was Google, the choices were, to say the least, significant. During and after the breakfast we listened to Google speakers who talked about Google Summer of Code and the Go programming language.

We then had a short tour of the San Francisco office where we could see beautiful views of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge.

After a few additional speakers, it was finally time for what I was anticipating most — the mentors from each of the 10 GCI open source organizations gave short lightning talks (3-5 minutes) about their projects and the work the GCI students accomplished during the 2013 contest

Finally it was time to return home. Below is an image of human misery — flying away from San Francisco at night seen from the airplane window…

When people ask me about the trip my response is usually “It was fantastic until I had to return!” My final words? Participate in Google Code-in! A friend told me that I shouldn’t really care about winning, because the number of people participating is so high that I wouldn’t stand a chance. When I later told him that I was chosen as a winner, his face was “priceless”. Even if you don’t end up on the Grand Prize Trip, it is definitely still worth the time and effort. It was a great experience for me to be able to create software that is actually used by MediaWiki users from around the world as a teenager.

By Mateusz Mackowski, GCI Grand Prize Winner for Wikimedia

An update on container support on Google Cloud Platform

Mary Radomile — Wed, 11 Jun 2014 18:23:00 +0000

Cross posted from the Google Cloud Platform Blog

Everything at Google, from Search to Gmail, is packaged and run in a Linux container. Each week we launch more than 2 billion container instances across our global data centers, and the power of containers has enabled both more reliable services and higher, more-efficient scalability. Now we’re taking another step toward making those capabilities available to developers everywhere.

Support for Docker images in Google App Engine
Last month we released improved Docker image support in Compute Engine. Today, we’re building on that work and adding a set of extensions that allow App Engine developers to build and deploy Docker images in Managed VMs. Developers can use these extensions to easily access the large and growing library of Docker images, and the Docker community can easily deploy containers into a completely managed environment with access to services such as Cloud Datastore. If you want to try it, sign up via this form.

Kubernetes—an open source container manager
Based on our experience running Linux containers within Google, we know how important it is to be able to efficiently schedule containers at Internet scale. We use Omega within Google, but many developers have more modest needs. To that end, we’re announcing Kubernetes, a lean yet powerful open-source container manager that deploys containers into a fleet of machines, provides health management and replication capabilities, and makes it easy for containers to connect to one another and the outside world. (For the curious, Kubernetes (koo-ber-nay'-tace) is Greek for “helmsman” of a ship.) Kubernetes was developed from the outset to be an extensible, community-supported project. Take a look at the source and documentation on GitHub and let us know what you think via our mailing list. We’ll continue to build out the feature set, while collaborating with the Docker community to incorporate the best ideas from Kubernetes into Docker.

Container stack improvements
We’ve released an open-source tool called cAdvisor that enables fine-grain statistics on resource usage for containers. It tracks both instantaneous and historical stats for a wide variety of resources, handles nested containers, and supports both LMCTFY and Docker’s libcontainer. It’s written in Go with the hope that we can move some of these tools into libcontainer directly if people find them useful (as we have).

A commitment to open container standards
Finally, I'm happy that I've been nominated to Docker's Governance Committee to continue working with the Docker community toward better open container standards. Containers have been a great building block for Google and by working together we can make them the key building block for “cloud native” applications.

-Posted by Eric Brewer, VP of Infrastructure

Google Summer of Code 2014 New Organizations – Part One

Mary Radomile — Fri, 06 Jun 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Every year, we spend time highlighting each of the “rookie” organizations who have joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC). With over 40 new organizations to the program in 2014, we’ll dedicate Fridays this summer to spotlight their mission and goals of participating in GSoC. This week, the Organization Administrators from Amahi and Code Mirror tell us more about their organizations.

Amahi is an open source home server solution based on linux distribution, developed with the goal of making networking simple. It provides all the functionality you would want in a home server (e.g. DHCP, DNS, File Sharing), while being as easy to use as a web browser. Designed as a modular architecture, Amahi is easily expandable through one click application installs to provide additional features such as Media Streaming, VPN, Disk Pooling and more.

This is Amahi’s first year as a mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code and we were
fortunate to have three student participants. Kasun Thennakoon will work on a Disk Wizard plugin which is one of the most requested features on the platform side. This will provide an intuitive interface for adding new storage to your home server. Arpit Goyal will work on “what is next”, by upgrading the platform to the latest technology (i.e. Rails 4) and facilitate the application installation by improving the Amahi plugin system. Last but not least, we have Artur Dryomov who will work on the Amahi Anywhere android app, that will give users access to their home server data from any location without VPN or port forwarding.

By Carlos Puchol and Bogdan Mitrea, Amahi Organization Administrators

CodeMirror is a versatile text editor implemented in JavaScript for your browser. It is specialized for editing code and comes with a number of language modes and add-ons that implement more advanced editing functionality. A rich programming API and a CSS theming system are available for customizing CodeMirror to fit your application. We've had a pretty narrow developer base thus far—participating in Google Summer of Code is a great way for us to get some talent on board for the summer, and hopefully longer.

This summer we have two Google Summer of Code students. One who is working on improving bidirectional text support and the other student will work on improving the vim bindings (specifically the visual mode and undo tree).

By Marijn Haverbeke, Code Mirror Organization Administrator

A chip off the ol’ Google Summer of Code block

Mary Radomile — Mon, 02 Jun 2014 17:00:00 +0000

We here in the Google Open Source Programs Office are always excited to hear about programs that are similar (or even inspired by) our flagship student program, Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Contributing to open source software in any capacity makes us happy, and learning about students exchanged in open source development makes us just plain giddy. We’d like to use today’s post to highlight some of the great open source student programs from past and present.

Outreach Program For Women - a program that encourages women to get involved in open source software
Open Summer of Code - an open source program for students in Belgium
Rails Girls Summer of Code - three-month full time scholarships to pairs of Rails Girls students, supported by coaches
Ruby Summer of Code - a student internship program designed to help fund student development of Ruby coding projects
European Space Agency Summer of Code - offers student developers stipends to write code for various space-related open source software projects
Oman Summer of Code - a open source coding program based in Oman
Summer of Learning at CMU - students learn how to program robots using free software

And don’t forget that Melange, the software used to run GSoC (as well as our contest for younger students, Google Code-in), is also open sourced. You are welcome to use it to start your own program. The source code can be found here.

Please use the comments section on the blog to tell us about your favorite Google Summer of Code-esqe program. We’d love to hear more!

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit

Mary Radomile — Thu, 29 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Every year after Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has come to an end, we invite two mentors from each of that year’s participating organizations to visit Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters and take part in the GSoC Mentor Summit—a three day unconference. There, they commingle with over 300 of their fellow mentors and organization administrators to talk shop and have some fun. During the 2013 GSoC Mentor Summit last October, we asked attendees from a variety of projects if they would take a few minutes out of their weekend to tell us more about their organization’s experience with Google Summer of Code.

Topics discussed in the videos include:

a description of their organization and what they do
the organization’s experience and history with GSoC
some of the projects students worked on during the 2013 program
types of projects they want students to work on in future GSoC programs
how the org has benefited from participating in GSoC
progressing from GSoC student to GSoC mentor

Below you can find a playlist with the mentor and organization administrator videos:

We recently announced the over 1300 students accepted into the GSoC 2014 program. We hope these videos will help mentors, students and future GSoC participants learn more about the program and the type of projects available to work on. In addition, all of these organizations would be thrilled to have new contributors outside of GSoC so please check them out to see if there is a project that interests you.

A huge thank you to Brian Grady for filming and editing these videos for us.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Google Summer of Code coding has begun!

Mary Radomile — Tue, 27 May 2014 14:16:00 +0000

Monday, May 19th was the first day of coding for our 10th year of the Google Summer of Code program. This year, more than 1,300 students will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 190 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

My Google Code-in experience

Mary Radomile — Wed, 21 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Today’s post comes from Sushain K. Cherivirala, one of the 20 uber-talented grand prize winners of Google Code-in, an open source coding competition for 13-17 year old students. The Open Source Programs Office recently hosted all 20 winners, their parents, and mentors at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Read more about Sushain’s experience in GCI below.

If I had to pick the single most educational experience of my life, it would be Google Code-in (GCI). I've completed MOOCs on topics from Philosophy to Functional Programming, finished my high school's computer science curriculum, taken a computer science internship and participated in countless programming contests. But I can claim with confidence that Google's initiative to put high school students into real-world open source development environments is unparalleled in its influence on me.

Google Code-in has helped me not only advance my technological expertise but also, more importantly, exposed me to an environment that few students my age have the opportunity to benefit from.

Throughout the course of the six week contest, I worked with Apertium, a free and open source platform for developing rule-based machine translation systems, not because I'm particularly adept at computational linguistics, but rather because of the exceptional atmosphere Apertium provided. I can recall the first time I ever connected to an IRC channel during GCI 2012; it was both my interest in the GCI task and my attraction to the positive, friendly environment on #apertium that convinced me to continue working with Apertium for the remainder of GCI 2012 and pick up with them at the start of GCI 2013. The positive development environment the mentors (Fran and Jonathan) established was conducive to learning, and more notably, learning from one's mistakes

Apertium's mentors were not just mentors in the sense that they reviewed my code and approved my tasks. Talking with the mentors exposed me to the world of academia, both its pleasures and pains. For instance, now I know the pitfalls of getting a PhD but also about extremely affordable European college tuitions that make me seriously consider applying to one next year, something that would never have crossed my mind without Fran's encouragement. Apertium, an organization by which its very nature encompasses developers of myriad cultures, languages, and social standards, has helped me grow a genuine appreciation for the world's diversity. I often find myself displaying a newfound interest in the stories and lives of my friends at school with foreign backgrounds, eager to learn more about their experiences and expand my narrow view of the world.

Working through IRC with people halfway across the world is not a particularly pleasant or efficient workflow; however, it did improve my communication skills as I learned to effectively communicate across time-zone differences, disparities in experience, and barriers like those I will inevitably encounter in my future workplace. For me, the greatest takeaway from working with these mentors has been their steadfast dedication to their projects and helping interested students. Google couldn't have chosen a more apt title for these mentors.

There's a certain indescribable pleasure associated with developing open source applications that help others, a feeling I had throughout GCI this year. My first task was writing documentation on developing web scrapers to build corpora used by Apertium for quality assurance and development. This helped me get back into the flow of GCI as I documented code I had worked extensively with last year. For the remainder of GCI, I concentrated heavily on coding with an emphasis on developing web applications. For example, I built a web concordancer with a Python backend and worked on APY, an HTTP API in Python using Tornado, designed to replace ScaleMT, a Java based Apertium webservice. I wrote a few modules for our IRC bot, begiak, and created a new statistics bot for the Apertium Wiki. While completing some other documentation tasks, I ended up writing a few scripts to perform the majority of the work such as creating huge data tables from SVN data and language vulnerability tables.

However, my crowning achievement during this Google Code-in was the development of Apertium-html-tools, a web application providing a fully localizable interface for translation, morphological analysis, and generation powered by Apertium APY. Apertium-html-tools was recently deployed on apertium.org, serving several thousand users and translating the equivalent of a few King James Bibles' worth of text each day. My work with Apertium after GCI has consisted primarily of improving Html-tools with search engine optimization, performance improvements, new features and more. I'm honored to have had the opportunity to contribute to Apertium for the past two years and am looking forward to continuing my involvement in the future.

Visiting Google HQ in Mountain View as a grand prize winner was an awesome experience, one that I'll cherish for the remainder of my life. From the Segway tour of San Francisco to the tour of Google HQ, I made memories that will stand out as some of the most enjoyable moments of my life. I particularly enjoyed being able to talk with Fran whom I had been working with for the past few months. The food choices were only trumped by the excellent talks from Google engineers on everything from self-driving cars to Melange (the software on which GCI is run). Talking with like-minded students my age only helped make the experience more entertaining. To be honest, my only regret is having to board the plane back home; Google's Open Source Programs Office truly spares no expense in giving the winners the experience of their lifetime.

Out of all the programming contests I've participated in, Google Code-in has offered the most authentic experience; there are no synthetic problems designed to test your coding ability, every line of code goes towards improving an open source organization's software. Working with Apertium during GCI has afforded me a new perspective on software development, made me a strong proponent of open source software, helped me gain valuable experience that will undoubtedly help me in the future and convinced me to remain a lifetime contributor to open source.

By Sushain K. Cherivirala, GCI Grand Prize Winner with Apertium, 2013

Google Summer of Code 2014 by the numbers: Part one

Mary Radomile — Thu, 15 May 2014 20:00:00 +0000

Every year around this time — just after students are accepted into Google Summer of Code (GSoC) — we at the Open Source Programs Office get a ton of questions like, “How many students from my country were accepted?”, “Am I the only undergraduate?”, “How many women are participating in GSoC this year?” and so on. Once we have a chance to crunch the numbers, we can use the statistics to answer at least some of these questions for you.

For this first post, we’ll start with “What countries are the accepted students from?” and “How many students were accepted from “X” country?” In years past we’ve listed the 10+ countries with the largest number of accepted students, but this year we’re going to share the whole list.

Here we go! In alphabetical order:

Algeria	1
Argentina	9
Armenia	1
Austria	21
Azerbaijan	1
Bangladesh	1
Belarus	2
Belgium	7
Bosnia-Herzegovina	1
Brazil	21
Bulgaria	6
Cameroon	3
Canada	37
Chile	1
China	48
Colombia	2
Croatia	3
Czech Republic	8
Denmark	1
Egypt	6
Estonia	2
Ethiopia	1
Finland	7
France	28
Georgia	1
Germany	78
Greece	13
Guatemala	1
Honduras	1
Hong Kong	2
Hungary	21
India	401
Ireland	4
Italy	31
Japan	6
Kazakhstan	3
Kenya	3
Latvia	1
Lithuania	3
Luxembourg	2
Malawi	1
Malaysia	2
Mexico	1
Moldavia	3
Netherlands	13
New Zealand	2
Nigeria	1
Norway	1
Pakistan	3
Paraguay	1
Peru	4
Philippines	2
Poland	40
Portugal	9
Romania	36
Russian Federation	51
Saudi Arabia	3
Serbia	5
Singapore	14
Slovak Republic	4
Slovenia	4
South Korea	5
Spain	32
Sri Lanka	54
Sweden	4
Switzerland	5
Taiwan	2
Turkey	9
Uganda	1
Ukraine	13
United Kingdom	29
United States	161
Vietnam	3
TOTAL	1307

As I’m sure you’ve noticed, five countries are highlighted in blue. This is the first year that students from Ethiopia, Honduras, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda have been accepted. We are very pleased to welcome them to the GSoC family!

We will be doing additional posts about the statistics for GSoC 2014 in the next few weeks. If you have questions, please drop us a comment and we’ll do what we can to answer in an upcoming post.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

The Interactive Spaces project continues to grow!

Mary Radomile — Mon, 12 May 2014 20:00:00 +0000

Interactive Spaces was first announced on the Google Open Source blog back in July 2012 and since then we’ve been working hard on several new releases. Interactive Spaces is an API and runtime which allows developers to merge the physical and virtual worlds by building interactive applications for physical spaces. With this platform you can build immersive physical spaces, home automation, physical-based computer gaming, and museum and interactive art installations.

Interactive Spaces has many new additions since it’s initial release, including:

• OpenCV support for image processing, including face detection
• Depth camera support using OpenNI and the Leap Motion
• XBee sensor meshes
• Examples using Arduinos to interface with sensors and control systems
• Speech synthesis
• Music playback
• XMPP and Twitter can be used to interact with your space
• Standard control protocols such as Open Sound Control and soon DMX
• Controller support for Android devices
• And much more…

Interactive Spaces powers 6 locations in Google offices (an example is the Mountain View Partner Plex) around the world with plans for many more. End Point has recently re-architected the Open Source Liquid Galaxy as an Interactive Spaces application, showing the power of the platform for building a very responsive, flexible system.

For more details please visit the website, http://www.interactive-spaces.org and take a look at the source code.

By Keith Hughes, Tech Lead, Experience Engineering Team, Google Engineering

Around the world in 126 days celebrating Google Summer of Code

Mary Radomile — Wed, 07 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

To celebrate our 10th Google Summer of Code (GSoC), members of the Google Open Source Programs Office have been traveling the world attending conferences, hosting events at local Google offices and holding meetups at universities where we have had high student participation over the last nine years of the program.

Smiles in Singapore

Students from 97 countries have participated in the program so far and we wanted to try to visit some of the countries to recognize the students, mentors and universities that have helped to make this program a success over the last decade.

University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka

The team visited 10 countries starting in late October beginning with the United Kingdom, then on to Canada, Romania, Poland, Australia, Sri Lanka, Belgium, India, Singapore and concluding with the FOSSASIA conference in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in early March.

GSoC Reception at the University of Toronto

This travel has been eye opening and an opportunity of a lifetime for all of us. We met friendly and enthusiastic students, teachers, mentors and open source enthusiasts from so many backgrounds and cultures — all with a love of open source.

Politechnic University of Bucharest, Romania

There have been over 7000 student participants and 7500 mentors since the program’s inception. These are incredible statistics, but actually meeting the people behind these numbers was rewarding in ways that we didn’t expect. Hearing stories time and time again from students about how they found their confidence and built their skill set during the summer they spent coding in GSoC was heartwarming. And almost all talked about the invaluable guidance they received from their mentors. To have a program where mentors from every time zone imaginable take up to 20 hours a week out of their busy lives to help guide a new open source contributor in their community is tremendous. We also spoke with many former students who are now active contributors to the open source communities they worked with during GSoC and quite a few have also become mentors for GSoC and/or Google Code-in (GCI).

Cambodia - FOSSASIA

Picture by Hong Phuc Dang

Cat Allman and I traveled to Norton University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in late February to talk about the open source programs we run, GSoC and GCI, and spend time with past GSoCers, and GSoC hopefuls. FOSSASIA helped organize travel for 10 former Google Summer of Code students to come from China, India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and Vietnam to talk about their experiences with the program and take part in the conference.

Cat gave an inspiring keynote, “GSoC: Past, Present, and Future”, which touched on opportunities the program offers both organizations and individuals to improve not only the state of open source software, but also their lives and the world.

Friday afternoon continued with four tracks of talks throughout the day ending with a panel discussion of Women in IT. The panel included Cat, three former GSoC students from 2013—Sindhu Sundar (GNOME), Sneha Priscilla Makini (GNU Mailman), Richa Jain (MediaWiki), and many other inspiring women.

Saturday morning I gave a talk on GCI, our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development. Most of the audience wasn’t familiar with GCI but I was quite pleased with the many questions posed by attendees including interested teachers that want to get their classes involved in our next contest.

Next up were GSoC lightning talks by all ten of the students that FOSSASIA organized travel for to attend the conference. Students talked about their experiences in GSoC and a few also gave very helpful tips about writing proposals and how to approach the GSoC application process. With eight tracks of talks on Saturday alone there really was a session for everyone.

GSoC Lunch in Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The enthusiasm we found in Cambodia and throughout our travels during this “world tour” celebrating GSoC was remarkable. We are all excited to start this tenth year of GSoC coding next month and to see what this year’s 1300+ students can accomplish during their 3 months of coding. Currently the students and mentors are engaged in their community bonding period where students learn more about their org’s code base, become involved in the communities and start their prep work for their coding which begins May 19.

Last but not least, the Google Open Programs Office would like to extend our thanks and gratitude to all of the volunteers who graciously hosted our team, spent countless hours organizing events, and toured us around your beautiful countries. It was an experience of a lifetime and one we won’t soon forget.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

My road to Google Summer of Code

Mary Radomile — Mon, 05 May 2014 20:00:00 +0000

As part of our celebration of the 10th instance of Google Summer of Code, we are highlighting some of our student participants on the Open Source blog. Today’s story comes from Hesham AL-Matary, a GSoC student for RTEMS for the past three years. Student participants have already been announced for GSoC 2014, but Hesham provides some great tips for those who may be interested in participating in the future.

In 2012, I learned about a program called Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that Google organizes for students to work on open source software projects. Like most Computer Engineering students, I knew GSoC was a great opportunity — if only I could have the chance to participate! My expectations of being accepted were very low. But I figured, why not give it a try? What could I lose? I decided to take the first step.

I scanned the GSoC program website and searched for the keywords that matched my interests: embedded systems, operating systems, RTOS, and C. It was great to see that's exactly what RTEMS tags included in their organization profile. I clicked on the link to the RTEMS website, read more about the organization, and searched for open projects. Not surprisingly, there was an open project that appealed to me. I completed some additional research, read more of RTEMS’ documentation, and finally felt ready to submit a proposal. I submitted my proposal early on in the program period and quickly realized this was a smart move; I was able to get lots of valuable and detailed comments and feedback from the folks in the RTEMS community.

Their comments made me believe that what I was proposing was something important and needed by users; a feeling that I never had before. After a few more weeks of discussions and project modifications, my proposal was ready. Once I submitted my proposal, I was comfortable with what I did and I knew I could not have done any better. A few weeks later, the projects were announced and I had been accepted! Without a doubt, that moment was a turning point in my life.

Participating in GSoC that first year with RTEMS allowed me to learn more about software engineering than I ever would have imagined. Specifically, I now know how important the design phase is, the benefits of feedback and discussions, and of course, why it’s useful to interact with the community via mailing list and IRC on a regular basis. My technical expertise has been enriched in a variety of areas including C programming, RTOS, gdb, gcc, simulators, hardware, embedded systems, git, source control, documentation and so much more. Last but not least, making connections with some great mentors at RTEMS was one of the best aspects of participating in GSoC for me.

You may be surprised to know that I actually enjoyed having deadlines, challenges and troubles. I feel that’s what GSoC is partially about (aside from encouraging students to work with open source software): a real world work experience. People in RTEMS, and any other organization, want you to complete your project successfully. They are thrilled to help you with the challenges you face. Thanks to my mentor at RTEMS I was able to pass both the midterm and final evaluations — I could finally brag that I was a former GSoC participant!

Statement of accomplishment - GSoC 2012

I am now in my third year of participating in Google Summer of Code with RTEMS. I also was able to participate as a mentor in Google Code-in, an open source contest that targets 13-17 year old students.This summer I’ll be working on my most challenging project yet!

GSoC helped me achieve the following:

I learned a ton about open source software.
I am hooked on open source and RTEMS.
I got hands-on experience with real world software.
I made connections with great developers.
I completed great projects (and got a nice stipend doing so).

If you are a student and considering applying to GSoC, here is my advice:

Don’t worry about your modest experience, you're bound to learn more as you go along in the program. Basics are enough.
Submit a proposal and get in touch with the organization community via IRC or their mailing list. Do both early!
Ensure your proposal is well structured and detailed. It should explain how you will work on the project and give a clear and reasonable timeline as well as deliverables. Most organizations provide a template for writing proposals.
Choose a project that appeals to the organization and its users while also matching your interests.

By Hesham AL-Matary, Google Summer of Code Student, 2012-2014

GStreamer hackfest in Munich

Mary Radomile — Thu, 01 May 2014 17:00:00 +0000

The Google Open Source Programs Office recently sponsored a hackfest for GStreamer, an open source, multiplatform multimedia framework used in various environments from desktop applications to embedded devices. Stefan Sauer from Google’s Munich office talks more about the event below.

Over the weekend of March 14-16th, the Google office in Munich, Germany hosted 20 developers of the GStreamer project for a hackfest. GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback and audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing.

During the hackfest, we worked on a variety of topics related to both the framework and applications. The group prepared new releases and discussed plans for version 1.4 and beyond. Last but certainly not least, we discussed how we can improve our documentation.

Some of the progress made on the framework side includes:

the integration of the opengl-plugins from a standalone repository into the gst-plugins-bad module.
a new torrent based streaming source.
improvements in many plugins (mpeg-ts, libva, dvb, dash), port the winks plugin to 1.0 and the design of new elements (v4l2-decoders).
a new device probing api that has been worked on for a long time finally got merged - this will allow applications to query hardware inputs and outputs together with their capabilities and select a specific one.
at the last GStreamer conference, we discussed the need for a better tracing infrastructure - during the hackfest, a prototype was demoed and next steps were discussed.

On the application side, we fixed some bugs on the Pitivi video editor, the Transmageddon transcoder, and the gnome-sound recorder.The Pitivi developers released the first stable GES/GNL/Gst-python packages in the 1.X version. These are the foundation for the non linear video editing.

Finally, our buzztrax developer got one tricky feature working: editing the pipeline structure (the data processing graph) while the playback is running. This work will lead to new sample code to help other projects and improvements in the documentation. Overall, it was a very productive two days!

Stefan Sauer, Google Engineering

GSoC meet-up at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Mary Radomile — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 18:30:00 +0000

Today’s blog post comes from Verónica Estrada Galiñanes, a 2013 Google Summer of Code participant and current student at the University of Neuchâtel in Switzerland. Speaking of GSoC, the accepted students for 2014 have just been announced and the community bonding period is currently under way. Please visit the program website for more information.

Last December, our Google Group organized a meet-up event in ETH Zurich, Switzerland. Since I am currently completing my PhD at University of Neuchâtel (UniNE), I thought it would be nice to repeat the experience for those living in Western Switzerland.

The first step was to propose the idea to UniNE faculty and find potential speakers. Several people offered to help and the idea took off. From Zürich, our previous speakers Seon-Wook Park, Iurii Chernyi and Wolf Bergenheim signed up again as potential speakers. From Geneva, Spyros Gasteratos showed interest to talk about his experiences as a student and a mentor for the OWASP Organization. From UniNE, my colleague Emanuel Onica said he had previous experience and advice to share. The icing on the cake was the generous offer from my supervisor, who offered to buy pizzas for the event! We finalized the date for February 27th.

Thanks to another GSoC enthusiast, Etienne Riviere, the event received publicity at six universities including University of Bern, University of Neuchâtel, University of Fribourg, University of Lausanne, University of Geneva and the University of Applied Science Western Switzerland. I also designed the event website, a Facebook public event and a registration form. The event was further promoted in the local newspaper and announced in the official UniNE website and calendars.

Events sometimes come with a few surprises and in our case, two confirmed speakers canceled the day of the meet-up. However, we found a solution that allowed the speakers to join via a Google Hangout which turned out to be quite successful.

The evening of the event arrived, and we were excited to see we had almost achieved 100% attendance! Our audience was quite diverse, with computer science students from all level of studies participating in the event. Some had experience with open-source projects but few had previous experience with GSoC.

I opened the informative session by giving a general talk to explain the what and why of GSoC. We then moved to the next subject — the experience of the student and mentor in GSoC. I gave a short overview of my student project on file sharing in Freenet Project. The guest speakers, Seon-Wook, Spyros and Emanuel did a great job by sharing inspirational stories and giving valuable advice. The event closed with a question-answer session driven by Wolf through a hangout. Questions like: "What kind of projects are selected by Google?" or "Should I apply to a project in which I am already involved?" were addressed by the speakers. In the end, we all enjoyed pizza and other snacks while chatting about our future plans regarding GSoC.

Speakers: (above from left to right) Seon-Wook, Emanuel, Spyros, (below) Wolf (via hangout) and Verónica

The video of our talks can be found on YouTube (slides only) and the complete version is found here (speakers and slides sync).

By Verónica Estrada Galiñanes, GSoC 2013 Freenet student

Pictures by Raluca Halalai

Google Summer of Code meet-up at NIT, Warangal

Mary Radomile — Thu, 24 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Today’s post is from Rashid Kahn who represents the Google Developers Group in Warangal, India. The group recently held a meetup to introduce local students to Google Summer of Code.

The Google Developers Group - NIT, Warangal held a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) meet-up on 2nd March, 2014. GSoC is an annual program run by Google for university students and provides an opportunity for students to work on real software projects during their summer vacations. Project topics can vary and range from Content Management Systems to Artificial Intelligence, but all are focused on free and open source software.

The main agenda for the day was to introduce the students to open source software and give more insight into how things work in these communities. I gave a talk about my experience as a student participant for Tomboy.OSX and GNOME Calculator. The talk covered many aspects of GSoC and clarified any questions students had about the program. After my presentation, we brought in a Leap Motion Controller for the event to show the students some of the latest developments in technology.

The last part of the meet-up was a hands on session introducing the Git versioning system. We believe knowing a version control system is essential for today's software development and it forms the backbone for supporting any project development — especially those distributed over continents. We felt the best choice to teach was Git, due to its distributed nature and ease of learning. The students were showed the usage of basic commands used in Git, and were encouraged to try them at the event.

The day came to end with students trying out various apps on Leap Motion Controller and trying out Git. We were excited for a great turnout of students to learn more about free and open source software and of course, GSoC!

By Rashid Khan, Google Summer of Code Student, 2013

Students Announced for Google Summer of Code 2014

Mary Radomile — Mon, 21 Apr 2014 20:30:00 +0000

Congratulations to the 1,307 students accepted for our 2014 Google Summer of Code! It was very tough for the 190 mentoring organizations to choose from the huge number of applications we received— 6,313 proposals from 4,420 students — and we want to thank everyone who applied.

Students will now enter the community bonding period where they will get to know their mentors and prepare for the program by reading documentation, hanging out in the IRC channel and familiarizing themselves with their new community before beginning their actual coding in May.

If you are interested in learning more about the 190 organizations that the students will be working with during the summer or reviewing important dates, please visit the program website.

We look forward to an exciting and productive summer of coding.

By Carol Smith, Google Open Source Programs Office

Google Summer of Code 10th year celebration in Singapore

Mary Radomile — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

During our whirlwind tour of SE Asia, the Google Open Source Programs team made a stop in Singapore to hold an event celebrating the 10th year of Google Summer of Code at the local Google office. Guest writer and GSoC enthusiast Ellen Wang shares her experience of the event below.

On February 25, the Google Open Source Programs team held a 10 year celebration for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program at the Google office in Singapore. I was proud to attend the event as a GSoC enthusiast and second year CS student at the National University of Singapore and also very eager to learn more about how the program works. It was so exciting that a team from Google flew all the way from San Francisco to visit us.
 
GSoC, a program that continuously attracts new blood into the open source world, is celebrating its 10th instance this year. Following on the success of the GSoC program for university students, Google started Google Code-in (GCI), a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high school and secondary school students ages 13-17) with the goal of encouraging young people to participate in open source.

On the day of the event, over 60 people attended the event including past GSoC students and mentors, professors from National University of Singapore and prospective students. After a warm welcome to all the invitees, two Googlers from the Open Source team, Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman, talked about the steps involved in applying to this year’s program. Specifically, they talked about the “10 things” GSoC initiative and described how the program will be enhanced to celebrate a decade of GSoC. One of these enhancements includes a 10% raise in the student stipend to 5500 USD. Stephanie then spoke about GCI and encouraged the audience to help get younger students involved.

Dr. Damith C. Rajapakse, a professor from the School of Computing at National University of Singapore, then gave a speech on his TEAMMATES project which was accepted as a mentoring organization in the 2014 instance of GSoC. National University of Singapore was also recognized for having the 3rd most students from a university participate in this program over the last nine years.

The event then featured local Singapore mentors and past GSoC students who gave talks on their projects, shared their personal experiences, and gave constructive ideas on how to develop a great proposal. This was perfect timing for someone like me, as the application period for students opened just a couple of weeks after the event.

The evening concluded with a networking session for students to talk with mentors, former GSoC students and the visiting Googlers. Guests were also treated to an abundance of well-prepared food and refreshments. The attendees enjoyed the event very much — it was very successful in raising the awareness of GSoC and open source development. It was a huge help for me as well! I applied to GSoC 2014 (students will be announced on April 21) and I hope to start regularly contributing to open source development. Many thanks to the Google team!

By Ellen Wang Zi, Computer Science Student, National University of Singapore

MediaGoblin: our summer of awesome

Mary Radomile — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Our final in a series of wrap-up posts from Google Summer of Code 2013 comes from Christopher Webber at MediaGoblin, a free software media publishing platform. MediaGoblin also took part in the Outreach Program for Women, a program inspired by GSoC to help get more women involved in free and open source software. Students from both programs are highlighted below.

MediaGoblin had a really great summer. We were lucky to participate in both Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the Outreach Program for Women. Read more about the great work accomplished last summer below:

Google Summer of Code Students:

Aditi Mittal’s blogging media type works, and we are polishing it up before we get it merged into master. Several exciting things came out of her work, including efforts to generalize media types as plugins (which they now are!). We use this new plugin infrastructure with the blogging media type, which now has its own panel and view.
Praveen Kumar got his search plugin up and running using Whoosh; efforts are now being made to merge and polish up with the present codebase.
Rodney Ewing went above and beyond all expectations for the summer. Not only did he finish “pluginifying” authentication (adding multiple plugins including LDAP, OpenID and Persona), he helped immensely with code review and many other projects, including most of the work on the “pluginification” of media types.

Outreach Program for Women projects:

Emily O’Leary worked on various testing tasks: improving the speed of unit tests (merged), working on a Jenkins testing setup set up for MediaGoblin, and getting a functional testing setup with Selenium. In the process, we also discovered some issues about how hard it is to get functional testing working nicely with MediaGoblin; many lessons learned), as well as the bonus task of ticket triage!
Jessica Tallon worked on federation support in MediaGoblin via the Pump API. Jessica wrote a wrapup post which can give you some sense of things, but things have continued even after that blogpost was originally written. PyPump has been rewritten and works really well, can do all sorts of new things. Updating MediaGoblin to include the appropriate endpoints for the Pump API is currently in progress; there is much work still to be done, but an image has been successfully submitted to MediaGoblin via PyPump.
Natalie Foust-Pilcher’s administrative interface work is now in place and pending review. The new admin interface includes new features such as the ability to set the terms of service / code of conduct for a site, the ability to submit reports on problematic users, and the ability to review and take actions on said reports. Additionally, some work has been done under the hood, including a nice new, "foundations," framework for adding default values into the database, and a new permissions/privileges system. All this thanks to Natalie’s work.

Overall it was a great summer. Thanks to the hard work of all our students we are much, much closer to MediaGoblin 1.0 than I would have dreamed. The only "downside" is that I now have a large pile of code to review and get cleanly merged with mainline MediaGoblin. Talk about problems you can’t complain about.

Thanks to all our students mentioned above… you all rock! And thanks also to our mentors: Sebastian Spaeth, Joar Wandborg, Aeva Palecek, and Aaron Williamson (well, and myself). Without you all this summer would not have been possible. And now, onward to use all this summer of awesomeness to make MediaGoblin the best media publishing software ever.

By Christopher Allan Webber, MediaGoblin Lead Developer

Google Summer of Code meets Hungary!

Mary Radomile — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Today we have a guest post from a former Google Summer of Code student, Dániel Géhberger, who is eager to spread the word about GSoC to his fellow Hungarians! The student application period for GSoC 2014 is now closed, but we are happy to report that there were 6,313 proposals by 4,420 students this year. Accepted students will be announced on April 21, 2014.

In 2013, 17 Hungarian students (including myself) participated in Google Summer of Code. Although this is a decent number, I was certain there were many more talented people around these parts who could participate in the 2014 program. I decided to hold an informational session at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics to inform more students about the program.

The members of the Department of Telecommunications and Media Informatics helped me to officially organize the event. We decided to hold the event in February on the same date as when the 190 Mentoring Organizations were announced so that the students could dive into different project ideas right away. We created a flyer and sent out many invitations to various student mailing lists.

The day of the event arrived quickly and we were hoping there would be lots of interest. We were pleasantly surprised that the room was completely full five minutes before the official start of the meetup. We eventually had to move into a larger room as students kept arriving. We ended up with over 90 students at the meetup!

We began the event with a general introduction of the program, covering the basic rules, dates, number of participating organizations, etc. The second part was dedicated to short talks about the personal experiences of past GSoC students. We strived to show that GSoC can suit a variety of students. We had one BSc student and two former MSc students speak — their projects ranged from embedded development Linux based systems and games, to an HTTP 2.0 implementation in JavaScript.

During the talks, we tried to emphasize some critical points for new students including choosing realistic projects, proposal writing, and most importantly, how crucial early communication with the organizations is. We also pointed out that participating students can make new connections which, in the long run, can be much more important than the money.

All in all the event was quite successful, and I strongly hope that we will see a huge rise in the number of Hungarian students in 2014. The Google Summer of Code program has opened endless opportunities for me— I hope it can do the same for others!

The slides (in Hungarian) are available on the webpage of the event, and if you are a Hungarian student, feel free to join our mailing list.

I would like to thank everyone who attended or helped to organize the event and special thanks to our speakers: Gábor Molnár (Mozilla), Péter Bozsó (ScummVM) and László Boros (The Fedora Project).

By Dániel Géhberger, GSoC student in 2012, 2013 and mentor in 2014 at The Wiselib

Babbage: easily encode or decode data with a click

Mary Radomile — Mon, 07 Apr 2014 17:00:00 +0000

Engineers at Google deal with encoded data on a daily basis. It’s very common to handle files encoded in a variety of different formats. For example, email attachments are Base64 encoded and web requests are URL encoded. Custom encodings bring another level of complication especially when different codings are chained together. Over time this constant need to encode / decode data left me with a large, unmanageable collection of scripts. This collection was simply not scaling, so I set off to create a better solution. We needed something easy to use and extensible enough to serve our future needs.

Today, I’m happy to introduce Babbage, an open source tool for manipulating data in many different formats. With Babbage you can easily decode or encode data with just a click. Paste in “SGVsbG8h”, select base 64 decode and you get “Hello!”. You can paste in text to process with plugins (which are an easy way to transform data). Babbage comes with a basic set of plugins to cover simple encodings and obfuscation techniques such as Base64, URL encoding, XOR and others. If you have something a bit more complicated, you can chain multiple plugins together. Babbage is open source and written so that anyone can create their own collection of plugins with libraries already in use.

Babbage was written in Python and JavaScript with Google Closure on top of Google App Engine. The full source code is available on GitHub. Develop something cool and share it with the world! We are always looking for new contributions — feel free to contact us on our developers discussion group.

By Tom Fitzgerald, Google Engineering

qLabel: Multilingual content without translation

Mary Radomile — Tue, 01 Apr 2014 17:30:00 +0000

Today we are happy to release qLabel, an open source JavaScript library that looks up and displays the labels of entities marked-up in a Web site in the language of the user. You can use qLabel in any Web document - below are some examples of where it might come in handy.

Some web sites provide content in a very structured form - think of restaurant menus, schedules, images with textual annotations, catalogs, etc. For example, this is a map of the inhabited continents:

Providing this content in different languages is as easy as looking up how all the mentioned entities in the SVG map are named in the other language. If we want to display the content in German, we need to know that South America is Südamerika in German and replace it.

The same works for Chinese:

Or, to take a language that Google Translate does not support yet, such as Uzbek:

The labels that we have used so far are from Wikidata, a sister project of Wikipedia launched in 2012. Wikidata supports more than 300 languages, but there aren't labels for all entities in all languages yet. Let’s take a look at Hindi:

We see that the Hindi name for Australia is still missing. But adding that is as easy as going to the Hindi view of Wikidata for Australia and add the label, and likely by now someone has already fixed it (and that would be visible here if those images above would indeed be embedded SVGs instead of PNG files - see the live map demo). You can improve the content in Wikidata and make more knowledge accessible to everyone.

In these cases, there is no need for intelligent translation algorithms in order to translate the Website: it is enough to look up the label for the mentioned entities in the language of the reader and display them in place. qLabel does exactly that.

The Website author annotates the entities mentioned in the page with unique identifiers, and qLabel looks up the name for these entities in the language requested by the user and displays them. No need to wait until your translation service of choice supports your language, it only depends on the underlying lexicon of entities and the languages they support.

Every entity is marked up with a URI, which is then used to look up the labels in the requested language. Take a look at the examples: the above map, a tournament schedule, a food menu, and tour dates. You can use any URI that supports look-up using Linked Data standards, in particular Google’s Freebase and Wikidata, but you can also publish your own set of entities and labels as RDF or JSON-LD and use them — and at the same time releasing them to the Semantic Web!

Read more about qLabel and how you can use it. Contributions to the code base are more than welcome, the source code is on Github. Let us know about how you use qLabel!

Thanks and kudos to rdfquery, Wikidata, any23, Freebase, Universal Language Selector, the Wiki Atlas, and the Wikidata Multilingual Picture Dictionary.

By Denny Vrandečić, Ontologist, Google Knowledge Graph

Introducing FarmHash

Mary Radomile — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 22:54:00 +0000

We’re pleased to announce the new FarmHash family of hash functions for strings. FarmHash is a successor to CityHash, and includes many of the same tricks and techniques, several of them taken from Austin Appleby’s MurmurHash.

We’re heavily influenced by the types of CPUs that are common in Google’s datacenters, but FarmHash’s goals don’t end there. We want FarmHash to be fast and easy for developers to use in phones, tablets, and PCs too. So, yes, we’ve improved on CityHash64 and CityHash32 and so on. But we’re also catering to the case where you simply want a fast, robust hash function for hash tables, and it need not be the same on every platform. To that end, we provide sample code that has one interface harboring multiple platform-specific implementations.

Over time, we plan to expand FarmHash to include hash functions for integers, tuples, and other data. For now, it provides hash functions for strings, though some of the subroutines could be adapted to other uses.

Overall, we believe that FarmHash provides high-performance solutions to some classic problems. Please give it a try! Contributions and bug reports are most welcome.

By Geoff Pike, Software Engineer

Google Code-In 2013: RTEMS project report

Mary Radomile — Thu, 27 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Today's post comes from RTEMS, an open source Real Time Operating System that supports a variety of open standard API’s. They have participated as a Google Code-in mentoring organization for the past 7 years.

Between November and early January, the RTEMS Project participated as one of ten mentoring organizations in the Google Code-in (GCI), a contest for pre-university students that encourages the involvement of students age 13-17 in open source communities.

During the seven week time-frame for GCI, RTEMS Project had 39 students complete 265 tasks under the tutelage of 15 mentors. That is an average of over five tasks per day! Many new students to RTEMS completed the Getting Started with RTEMS task, which provided both useful feedback about new users interested in working with RTEMS and prepared the students for hands-on programming work with our systems. We are proud of the efforts and accomplishments of all the students and grateful to the Google Open Source Programs Office, our mentors, organization administrators, and the open source community that helped support them along the way.

Below are descriptions of some of the more notable accomplishments that the students achieved in each of the five task categories: Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, and User Interface.

Code

C99 “restrict” keyword added to Newlib C Library for POSIX conformance.
Ported the Rhealstone Benchmark to RTEMS, now available in testsuites/rhealstone.
Refactored over a dozen BSPs to conform to guidelines determined by Vipul Nayyar’s GSoC 2013 project.
Refactored portions of the monolithic sp09 test case into new, finer-grained tests.
Created or fixed 9 POSIX timing tests.

Documentation / Training

Determined guidance for doxygen use in BSPs and added doxygen comments to about 40 BSPs.
Fixed documentation in the RTEMS POSIX user manual and in multiple test cases.

Outreach / Research

Created 2 video tutorials for Getting Started with RTEMS.
Updated the RTEMS wiki page up to date for the first time in six years (using references from Google Scholar).

Quality Assurance

Investigated and/or fixed over 20 bugs in the RTEMS Bugzilla.
User Interface
Updated the rtems-graphics-toolkit repository and fixed some bugs.

Thanks again to everyone involved in making GCI 2013 a successful one for RTEMS Project.

By Gedare Bloom, RTEMS Project Org Admin

Steel Bank Common Lisp wrap-up post: new Google Summer of Code org in 2013

Mary Radomile — Mon, 24 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Christophe Rhodes from Steel Bank Common Lisp, a high performance Common Lisp compiler, is today’s guest writer on the Google Open Source Blog. SBCL participated as a mentoring organization for the first time in Google Summer of Code 2013 and will join us again in 2014.

Google's call for organization proposals in the 2013 Summer of Code program spurred Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) developers to organize their thoughts and come up project suggestions that could be reasonably achieved in the course of two to three months. The construction of the list was already a positive outcome, but SBCL being accepted into the 2013 program was a huge bonus, and allowed us to work with two students on two successful projects. Read more about them below:

Modernizing register allocation (student: Alexandra Barchunova, mentor: Paul Khuong)
Alexandra proposed to improve the register allocator in SBCL by implementing a classic algorithm known to perform well on practical C and Fortran programs. Adapting that algorithm, on top of the pre-existing register allocation infrastructure, took the better part of the summer. It also helped fix bugs and suboptimalities in related support code.

Because register allocation is such a fiddly problem, the remainder of Alexandra’s project period was spent exploring various tweaks and parameterisation for the high level iterative colouring/spilling logic described by prior research.

The new allocator has been forward-ported and cleaned up, and it can hopefully be merged in the near future. Alexandra plans to keep working on the allocator, and we hope to see the result hit official SBCL by the end of the year. Her work is at https://github.com/abarch/sbcl.

Efficient interpretation (student: Matthias Benkard, mentor: Juho Snellman)
Matthias' project was to develop an efficient interpretation scheme for SBCL, starting from strategies such as Feeley's use of closures in code generation. The idea was to develop a fast compiler from Lisp code to an internal representation while performing minimal compilation on the way, as well as an efficient interpreter of this internal representation. Matthias successfully developed these two components, and in addition, integrated this evaluation strategy into other parts of the Lisp environment.

Matthias did manage to give his mentor Juho some stress and strain — most notably by informing him, a week before the `pens-down date', that a substantially different approach was likely to have some benefits, and that he was going to go for it. Fortunately, he got there in time, and it certainly did have additional benefits! Matthias' interpreter is benchmarked as being around 10 times faster than the simple s-expression interpreter, and all is looking promising for a merge into the mainline SBCL in the near future. His code is available at https://github.com/benkard/sbcl.

It was a good summer for the SBCL team as a whole. Participation in GSoC has been a good morale boost as well as good general publicity for our organization. And there's no shortage of challenging and fun projects left to tackle. We are also very excited to have been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code 2014!

By Christophe Rhodes, Org Admin for SBCL

Google Summer of Code: a celebration of India

Mary Radomile — Fri, 21 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000

The Google Open Source Programs team has been on a mighty adventure the past six months. To celebrate our 10th year of Google Summer of Code, we’ve visited 10 countries, flown over 50,000 miles, and met with hundreds (if not thousands!) of Google Summer of Code enthusiasts all over the globe. One of our last stops was India, which boasts the second largest amount of participants since the program inception in 2005. Guest writer Sri Harsha Pamu shares his experience of the event below.

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is quite an amazing program — it provides an opportunity for students to learn and contribute to free and open source software by working on real projects (and get paid for it!). To put it simply, GSoC is a ticket to the exciting journey of the Open Source world.

The Google Summer of Code program was announced very early, immediately after the GSoC 2013 program. Though I am not eligible to participate as a student for this year’s program, I am very excited to participate as a mentor for the National Resource for Network Biology (NRNB). When the Open Source Programs team at Google announced the stunning “10 things” initiative, I was thrilled to not only see India on the list of countries the team was visiting, but also honored to participate in the event. I was especially proud to learn that India stands second in the world in GSoC participation with 1042 students and 368 mentors since the program’s inception.

The event was held at the local Google office in Hyderabad on February 21. The room was filled with students and mentors from previous years of GSoC as well as several open source enthusiasts who came from all across India to attend this wonderful event. The evening kicked off with the presentation on GSoC by Google Open Source Programs Office team members, Stephanie Taylor and Cat Allman. They also spoke about the Google Code-in, their success with these initiatives, and what the team has planned for the future. Next, there were short talks by previous GSoC students who described their projects, the organizations they worked with and their personal experience as a GSoC’er. I was one of the speakers and was happy to share my work as a student with NRNB.

After the talks, there was a raffle for all the attendees. One lucky student won a brand new Google Nexus 7 tablet. The evening wrapped up with a scrumptious dinner, knowledge sharing, photo sessions and tons of Google swag. The event was a phenomenal success.

I would like to thank the entire team of the Google Open Source Office for initiating such brilliant programs which encourage student programmers to contribute to free and open source projects. I hope that there will be an exponential increase in the number of Indian student participants in the coming years!

Sri Harsha Pamu, NRNB 2013 GSoC Student

Open Source Release: LiquidFun 1.0

Mary Radomile — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000

Last December we announced the initial release of LiquidFun, a C++ library that adds particle physics, including realistic fluid dynamics, to the open-source Box2D. Today, we’re excited to be releasing LiquidFun 1.0!

New features in this release include:

Multiple particle systems
New particle behaviors: barrier, static-pressure, and repulsive
Particle lifetimes
Detection of stuck particles
The ability to apply forces and impulses to particles
Java support via SWIG
A host of new demos: inside the existing Testbed application; and, a gorgeous new “EyeCandy” demo for Android

Download the latest release from our github page and join our discussion list!

Several Googlers made LiquidFun possible: Howard Berkey, Alice Ching, Wolff Dobson, Dave Friedman, Stewart Miles, Jason Sanmiya, Kentaro Suto, and Ali Tahiri.

By Dave Friedman, Fun Propulsion Labs*

*Fun Propulsion Labs is a team within Google that's dedicated to advancing gaming on Android and other platforms.

Progress in person: the 2014 Buildroot Developers Meeting

Mary Radomile — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000

The Google Open Source Programs Office recently co-sponsored the annual Buildroot Developers Meeting at our office in Brussels, Belgium. Read more about their meeting below.

On February 3rd and 4th, the Buildroot project held its Developers Meeting at the local Google offices in Brussels. Buildroot is a tool that allows users to build embedded Linux systems by cross-compiling all necessary libraries, applications, the cross- compilation toolchain itself, the Linux kernel and other useful components. Buildroot is used by numerous companies and hobbyists, including Google for the Google Fiber devices, by many processor vendors and embedded system makers. It’s simple — you tell Buildroot what you want in your embedded Linux system through a kernel-like "menuconfig" interface, hit "make", and voila! Your embedded Linux system is ready to run!

The Developers Meeting brought together 12 participants from countries all over the globe including Finland, France, the UK and the United States. Over the two day event, participants discussed hot topics and made key decisions for issues that prove difficult to discuss over mailing lists or IRC. We also worked on cleaning up the list of patches waiting to be integrated — a list that has grown significantly with the popularity of the project! Meeting physically not only allowed work to get done during the meeting, but also allowed contributors to get to know each other better. We believe it will make our interactions online much more efficient in the future.

Join us at http://buildroot.org, or take a look at the detailed report of the meeting to learn more about our progress. Many thanks to our sponsors Google and Mind who made this meetup possible.

By Thomas Petazzoni, Buildroot Org Admin

Teaching the next generation to code: Young Coders at PyTennessee 2014

Mary Radomile — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 19:00:00 +0000

The Google Open Source team recently sponsored the PyTennessee conference in Nashville. Adam Fletcher, an Engineer at Google and today's guest blogger, volunteered at the conference and helped introduce Python to an enthusiastic group of students.

On February 23rd & 24th the first PyTennessee took place in Nashville, Tennessee, and brought hundreds of pythonistas from all over the nation to learn about a diverse set of Python-related topics. On Saturday the 24th, PyTennessee ran a Young Coders event, based on a similar event that took place at the 2013 US PyCon. Google was proud to sponsor this event, providing funding for the Raspberry Pi computers the coders used throughout the day.

Mayor of Nashville, Karl Dean, with the students

The Young Coders event introduced 25 new programmers, aged 12-18, to the world of Python by providing each student with a Raspberry Pi running Linux and a day of instruction in the Python programming language. Students were taught about the basic data types and control flow in Python in the morning and then spent the afternoon making and modifying games. When the event wrapped up the students got to take home their Raspberry Pi computers to continue their programming exploration at home. Additionally, the students each got a copy of Python For Kids, an excellent introductory book.

Raspberry Pi, the compact computer the students used to learn Python

Earlier in the day the Mayor of Nashville, Karl Dean, stopped by to learn about the Young Coders event and to talk to the students. Mayor Dean was excited about Nashville as a technology center; Nashville is one of the cities being evaluated for Google Fiber, and Google has selected Nashville as one of the Google for Entrepreneurs Tech Hub Network cities.

Later, the students used their newfound Python knowledge to modify various games. Students altered the startup screen, changed the frame rates, modified the fundamental rules, and made other fun changes to games written in the PyGame framework.

Two students hard at work

Katie Cunningham (right) with two Young Coders

The Young Coders event would not have been successful without its excellent instructor, Katie Cunningham. Big thanks to her and to the entire PyTennessee team for for organizing such a wonderful event, and for providing the space to help train the next generation of computer scientists!

By Adam Fletcher, Google Site Reliability Engineer

Get with the program: open source coding with Google Summer of Code

Mary Radomile — Mon, 10 Mar 2014 19:01:00 +0000

Cross Posted from the Official Google Blog

Tobi Mueller started coding when his grandfather, who works in IT, gave him access to a spare PC. It was a sweet 286 machine which Tobi learned to program with the then-popular teaching language Pascal. He eventually became interested in free and open source software, but it was Google Summer of Code (GSoC) that helped transform Tobi into the free software contributor he is today.

Tobi was a GSoC student in 2007 for GNOME, a free software desktop environment. He’s been a regular contributor to the GNOME community ever since—and in 2012, Tobi was elected to the GNOME Foundation board of directors.

Tobi is one of more than 7,500 students who have participated in Google Summer of Code program over the past nine years. Every summer, GSoC participants work with various organizations in the open source community, building important technical skills and gaining workplace experience. Students aren’t the only ones who benefit; their projects also give back to the open source community. Karen Sandler, GNOME’s executive director, told us how Google Summer of Code “encourages and empowers” new contributors and helps “invigorate projects.”

So if you’re a university student looking to earn real-world experience this summer, we hope you’ll consider coding for a cool open source project with Google Summer of Code. We’re celebrating the 10th year of the program in 2014, and we’d love to see more student applicants than ever before. In 2013 we accepted almost 1,200 students and we’re planning to accept 10 percent more this year.

You can submit proposals on our website starting now through Friday, March 21 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 190 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. There are a limited number of spots, and writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program—so be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice. For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until March 21 to apply!

Posted by Carol Smith, Google Open Source team

Google Code-in and Haiku: four years strong

Mary Radomile — Fri, 07 Mar 2014 18:00:00 +0000

Google Code-in wrapped up in January and the 20 Grand Prize Winners have been announced. Haiku, a veteran GCI organization, is here to talk about their experience and history of participating in GCI.

This was the fourth year of Google Code-in, and the fourth for Haiku to participate as a mentoring organization for students. This contest came at a good point this year for Haiku as our package management merge happened just a few weeks prior to the start of the contest and thus gave us plenty of ideas for tasks. Nearly half of our tasks were somehow related to writing recipes for packages to be built into .hpkg files. We also opened our Coverity scan results for students to try their hand at fixing some of those issues for the first time. Along with these tasks, there were several others which ranged from fixing specific bugs from Haiku's Trac tickets, to writing new programs. Examples include a blogging program and a spider solitaire game, and even a few projects for artistic students who created a new flyer and some new icons.

This year we had five students who completed 20 or more tasks, more than any of our students completed during GCI 2012. We had 42 students who completed a total of 245 tasks for Haiku which is more than have been completed in any previous year for Haiku, so it was a very good year for us. Of the 42 students, 19 of them completed three or more tasks which qualified them to receive a Google Code-in 2013 t-shirt.

I'd like to thank the 19 Haiku mentors, which included three former Google Code-in students, and all 42 students who completed at least one task for Haiku this year. Also a special thanks to those who were on IRC to help handle the flood of students during the contest, for their patience in answering all the questions that the students were asking. It was another very productive (and fun!) Code-in.

By Scott McCreary, Org Admin for Haiku