Google Data

Free and open source software is a crucial part of the security infrastructure of the internet. As a Googler working on security issues, especially those involving open source software, I want to describe some of the open source security projects Google is involved with. This list is far from comprehensive, but comprises some of the projects I have personally had a hand in.

OpenSSL

Google employs two members of the OpenSSL team, myself and Bodo Möller. As well as helping to address security issues as they arise (sometimes discovered by other Googlers) we’ve also been helping with work to improve OpenSSL’s capabilities, for example implementing application-defined TLS extensions, adding support for ALPN (http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-tls-applayerprotoneg-01) and adding a framework for Authenticated Encryption with Additional Data (AEAD) (work in progress).

Capsicum

Over the last decade or so, it has become increasingly (and painfully) apparent that ACLs and MAC, which were originally designed to protect expensive mainframes from their users, and the users from each other, are failing to secure modern cheap machines with single users who need protecting from the software they run.

Instead, we need fine-grained access control and strong sandboxing.

My Cambridge colleague, Dr. Robert Watson says:

In August 2010, the University of Cambridge and Google published the Capsicum security model at the USENIX Security Symposium. Initially funded by a Google Faculty Research Award, Capsicum combines security ideas from historic research capability systems with contemporary operating-system design to allow robust, fine-grained, flexible, and application-centred sandboxing. Since 2012, Google Open Source Programs Office and the FreeBSD Foundation have been jointly funding continuing open source development to transition Capsicum from research to practice; Google also has summer students working on Capsicum through Google Summer of Code under the FreeBSD organization. 

The project has been led by FreeBSD developer Pawel Dawidek, who has refined the Capsicum model as our experience has grown, updating existing privilege-separated applications to use Capsicum (e.g., OpenSSH and dhclient). Pawel has also adapted new applications to use Capsicum compartmentalisation “out-of-the-box”, including system tools services (e.g., tcpdump, kdump,the high-availability storage daemon [hastd], the security audit-trail distribution daemon [auditdistd]), and UNIX pipeline components (e.g., grep, uniq). The goal is to move gradually towards ubiquitous sandboxing: since it is cheap (and often easy), explore what happens when you try to do it everywhere, mitigating as-yet unknown future vulnerabilities. 

A key contribution of this work is the Casper application framework. Casper manages the creation of sandboxes, launching them on demand with only the rights they require to operate (Saltzer and Schroeder’s 1975 Principle of Least Privilege). Existing applications can be linked against Casper to make use of a growing suite of Casper components, including sandboxed DNS resolution, delegation of file-system subsets, cryptographic random number generation, network services (such as sockets), system monitoring interfaces (via sysctl), and system databases such as the user and password files. 

Pawel’s current work is due to wrap up later in 2013. FreeBSD 10.0 will ship with Capsicum enabled by default and a suite of sandboxed applications.

Certificate Transparency

A key concern has been the repeated failures of Certificate Authorities (CAs) to properly defend their operations and correctly issue certificates, most recently exemplified by the DigiNotar incident, which not only compromised the security of hundreds of thousands of internet users, but also led to the company’s bankruptcy.

We’ve been working hard on a new idea in that area, Certificate Transparency – essentially a verifiably correct log of all issued certificates that can be used to quickly detect any missteps on the part of CAs. And, of course, we are hard at work on an open source implementation, with clients in C++, Java and Python, and a C++ server.

Tor

Tor (originally short for The Onion Router), is a free software for enabling online anonymity. Widely recognized as a key component in online privacy, Foreign Policy Magazine named its primary authors among its 2012 Top 100 Global Thinkers “for making the web safe for whistleblowers.” Originally released in 2002 by the US Naval Research Laboratory, Tor development is now supported by a broad range of governments, organizations and individuals. Google is proud to have had the Tor Foundation as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization since 2007, providing the project with both funding and potential new contributors.

Libpurple

If you’ve ever “chatted” online chances are very good that you’ve used libpurple. Libpurple is the core of various instant messaging applications, notably Pidgin and Adium. Through a donation to Instant Messaging Freedom, Inc. we have sponsored a developer working on improving its security.

By Ben Laurie, Security Engineering

A year ago, we released Course Builder, an experimental platform for online education at scale. Since then, individuals have created courses on everything from game theory to philanthropy, offered to curious people around the world. Universities and non-profit organizations have used the platform to experiment with MOOCs, while maintaining direct relationships with their participants. Google has published a number of courses including Introduction to Web Accessibility which opens for registration today.  This platform is helping to deliver on our goal of making education more accessible through technology, and enabling educators to easily teach at scale on top of cloud platform services.

Today, Google will begin working with edX as a contributor to the open source platform, Open edX. We are taking our learnings from Course Builder and applying them to Open edX to further innovate on an open source MOOC platform.  We look forward to contributing to edX’s new site, MOOC.org, a new service for online learning which will allow any academic institution, business and individual to create and host online courses.

Google and edX have a shared mission to broaden access to education, and by working together, we can advance towards our goals much faster. In addition, Google, with its breadth of applicable infrastructure and research capabilities, will continue to make contributions to the online education space, the findings of which will be shared directly to the online education community and the Open edX platform.

We support the development of a diverse education ecosystem, as learning expands in the online world. Part of that means that educational institutions should easily be able to bring their content online and manage their relationships with their students. Our industry is in the early stages of MOOCs, and lots of experimentation is still needed to find the best way to meet the educational needs of the world. An open ecosystem with multiple players encourages rapid experimentation and innovation, and we applaud the work going on in this space today.

We appreciate the community that has grown around the Course Builder open source project. We will continue to maintain Course Builder, but are focusing our development efforts on Open edX, and look forward to seeing edX’s MOOC.org platform develop.  In the future, we will provide an upgrade path to Open edX and MOOC.org from Course Builder. We hope that our continued contributions to open source education projects will enable anyone who builds online education products to benefit from our technology, services and scale. For learners, we believe that a more open online education ecosystem will make it easier for anyone to pick up new skills and concepts at any time, anywhere.

By Dan Clancy, Director of Research

For our final post in the Google Summer of Code blog series highlighting new open source organizations participating in this year’s program, we have organization administrators from TimVideos.us and lmonade discussing their student’s projects.

TimVideos.us is a group of projects which together create a system for doing both recording and live event streaming for conferences, meetings, user groups and other presentations. The project combines both software (gst-switch, streaming website and tools, speaker tracking, etc.) and hardware projects (HDMI2USB – A HDMI/DVI Capturing Solution). Parts of the system have been been used at large open source conferences such as Linux.conf.au, PyCon US and others.

Google Summer of Code 2013 has generously funded three students to work on the following TimVideos.us projects:

• EDID Database Website – Code  Extended display identification data (EDID) is a data structure provided by a digital display to describe its capabilities to a video source. Many devices ship with bad or misleading EDID information. The goal of this project is to develop a website to list EDID information, allowing users to browse, search and update them. 

• Developing Python API for gst-switch – Code  gst-switch aims to do interactive live mixing of incoming video streams, designed to meet the needs of conference recording. Designed as a flexible replacement for DVSwitch, and based around GStreamer, this project aims to develop a Python API for controlling and testing gst-switch. 

• Porting Flumotion to the Gstreamer-1.0 API – Code  Flumotion is a streaming media server which uses Gstreamer at its core. GStreamer recently released it’s 1.0 API which is not compatible with the old 0.10 Flumotion. 

We hope that through our projects, the costs and expertise currently required to produce live streaming events will be reduced to near zero. We wish to develop a system where everyone has the ability to record presentations and host live remote participants across the globe.  

By Tim Ansell, TimVideos.us Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator and Mentor

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lmonade is a scientific software distribution that can be installed without administrative rights on Unix based systems. Building on the Gentoo packaging system, we hope to solve the dependency nightmare experienced by all sufficiently complex scientific software packages which have release schedules that do not fit the restrictions of packagers for large GNU/Linux distributions.

We are thrilled to be a part of Google Summer of Code as a new organization this year. As an umbrella organization, lmonade promotes ideas to improve various open source/free mathematical software, especially computational algebra projects. After the midterm evaluations, we are continuing the Google Summer of Code with 4 projects:

• Tom Bachmann – C++ wrapper for FLINT – FLINT is a highly optimized library for performing computations in number theory, written in C. This project aims to create C++ wrappers using expression templates, which compile down to code which achieves performance as close to native C as possible. 

• Remus Barbatei – Continuous integration platform for lmonade – This project is about improving the existing CI infrastructure used by lmonade to take advantage of the build instructions and dependency information stored in its package repository and easily set up nightly testing facilities for more scientific software packages. 

• Verónica Suaste – New decoding algorithms for error correcting codes in Sage – The main goal of this work is to implement decoding algorithms based on Gröbner bases methods in Sage. While improving the coding theory module of Sage, this will provide the opportunity to compare performance of this new algorithm with implementations in computer algebra systems. 

• Ioana Tamas – Binary decision diagrams for Boolean polynomial rings – Zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams are used by Polybori for efficiently representing Boolean polynomials. At the moment, they are manipulated via CUDD, which is not specialized on these types of diagrams and only uses C in the implementation. The goal of this project is to implement an independent library in C++ that is specialized on zero-suppressed binary decision diagrams. 

We wish all our students continuing success in their projects. 

By Burcin Erocal, lmonade Organization Administrator 

It’s hard to believe the student coding for Google Summer of Code 2013 will conclude in less than three weeks! To view a complete list of the projects students are working on this summer, visit the Google Summer of Code program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Some of the best apps are those that specialize in a single task. With Patchfield, a new open-source audio library for Android, you can create highly focused audio apps (such as synthesizers and effects) and then combine their capabilities by connectin…

Over the past 11 weeks we have highlighted 29 open source organizations participating in their first Google Summer of Code. For our final post in this annual summer series, we have organization administrators from Funf Open Sensing Framework and the Open Source Robotics Foundation describing their student’s projects below.

The Funf Open Sensing Framework is an extensible sensing and data processing framework for mobile phones. The Funf project aims to help both developers as well as non-technical researchers and individuals. The Funf-in-a-Box service lets users configure and build a custom data collection app in less than five minutes, with zero programming. Funf Journal, a mobile app available on the Android Play Store, allows users to collect and explore data about their lives (quantified-self), and gives developers/researchers a chance to evaluate the capabilities underneath the hood. All of these are built on top of the Funf SDK, which can be used by developers to incorporate sensing functionality into their apps, and can be extended to provide new sensing capabilities. 

This is Funf’s first year in Google Summer of Code and we formed a small and tight working group consisting of our two organization mentors and our two amazing students, Swetank Kumar Saha and Pararth Shah. We have been working on two fronts: Adding core functionality to the Funf SDK and enhancing Funf In A Box (FIAB) which has become very popular with researchers and data collection enthusiasts. Pararth has spearheaded work on the core library and added support for high bandwidth probes, including raw audio, video, and timelapse. We’re now diving into advanced triggers and scheduling that will allow for dynamic sensing configurations. On the FIAB side, Swetank is adding support for configuring and deploying custom surveys and capturing additional user input.  Amazingly, he also managed to fit in porting the FIAB architecture from a single Amazon server to Google Cloud Services, which is going to greatly reduce our costs and increase our performance. The summer isn’t over yet, so stay tuned for more new features and updates! 

By Nadav Aharony and Alan Gardner, Funf Organization Administrators 

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The Open Source Robotics Foundation (OSRF) has a clear mission: “To support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.” We have three exciting Google Summer of Code projects contributing to CloudSim, Gazebo, and ROS, which currently represent three of our biggest open source efforts.  

Esteve Fernández has been adding support for OpenStack to CloudSim, a project developed by OSRF to run robotics simulations in the cloud. CloudSim was used to support the DARPA Virtual Robotics Challenge and currently supports the Amazon and SoftLayer clouds. Esteve added support for private clouds to CloudSim, enabling organizations to run simulations on their own networks. Furthermore, Esteve is contributing to CloudSim by fixing bugs, improving the code base and helping with any task that comes up. In the following weeks, he will be making CloudSim constellations accessible to users in an OpenStack cloud provided by OSRF as a public service. 

Andrei Haidu is developing a fluid dynamics physics engine for the Gazebo robot simulator that will enable the use of aerial and underwater vehicles in simulation. 

Gonzalo Abella is developing a new parameter server prototype for ROS. He is exploring making all parameters dynamic, and integrating the capabilities of the dynamic_reconfigure package into the core API. 

By Carlos Agüero, Open Source Robotics Foundation Organization Administrator

We hope you have enjoyed reading about many of the new organizations participating in Google Summer of Code this year over these past 3 months. Students have a little over two  weeks to wrap up their summer projects before the soft pencils down date on September 16th.  For more details on important dates you can visit our program timeline and you read about all of the 177 open source projects participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code on the program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Bringing innovation and teaching together, the KDE community takes the spirit of Google Summer of Code and keeps building on it to reach even more students. For the ninth year, the KDE community is participating in the Google Summer of Code with 50 student projects. KDE also has three women participating this summer in the Outreach Program for Women run by the GNOME Foundation. As in previous years, the KDE community has organized the ‘Season of KDE‘ for motivated students whose proposals didn’t make it in either Google Summer of Code or the Outreach Program for Women.


With so many students and a request for them to blog regularly about their progress, 
Planet KDE has many Google Summer of Code related posts written by this year’s students. This allows the wider KDE community to follow the work done by the students and comment on it. But this is not the only way the students share what they are doing. At the Akademy conference in Bilbao, many students were present, presenting their work in their own session or as part of the Student Programs Presentation. Students also update the KDE wiki with the status of their projects. 



The Google Summer of Code students are working on a wide variety of KDE projects, from components of the basic shell (network management) to the core of that shell itself (dynamic switching between shells based on form factor changes) to end user applications. Some projects move out of the desktop sphere, with a web shop for the popular Krita painting application, as well as a project report tool showing development statistics on KDE sub-projects. 



Projects are pushing the boundaries of technology, bringing in openGL and collaborative text editing in KDE applications, and exploring unique interfaces for features like the human-friendly query parser for the Semantic Search technology in KDE. 


Since the first Google Summer of Code in 2005, the KDE community continues to push the boundaries of technology. Students discover how the process of collaboration and open innovation results in a great experience, and the IT world gains valuable new participants. And the students in turn get a chance to shine while making a valuable contribution to society!

By Jos Poortvliet, KDE Marketing team

Recently Google hosted just over 100 GCC (GNU Compiler Collection) developers at our Mountain View, CA headquarters for the 3rd annual GNU Tools Cauldron. The purpose of this 2+ day workshop was to gather GNU tools developers together to coordinate work, exchange reports on ongoing efforts, and discuss development plans for the next 12 months.

For me, the most interesting result was the final realization that GCC is once again in need of a major code base reorganization.  For several quarters we have been working on modernizing the codebase. We switched it to C++, we started converting core data structures and are beating the refactoring drum. All those efforts were not wasted and there are two major efforts in progress now that will fundamentally alter the structure of the compiler.

The one I’m most hopeful about is Red Hat’s proposal to extend the modularization effort we had started last year. This will see the compiler split into hermetic modules that will only be able to communicate via well-defined interfaces (if you’ve ever hacked on GCC, you’ll know how much this simplifies life).

The other, related, effort is the removal of all global state from the compiler.  The final goal is to allow the compiler to be turned into a shared library and used for JIT purposes.

Among my favorites of the videos of the presentations from the Cauldron are those dealing with this overhaul of the GCC codebase.  This is going to fundamentally transform GCC internals over the next couple of years. GCC 5.0 will be unrecognizable. Watch the videos on the removal of global state and GCC re-architecture.  Exciting stuff!

Another especially interesting moment at the Cauldron was when Dehao Chen presented his work on AutoFDO.  This work will significantly simplify the usability of FDO technologies.  I can’t wait to see this submitted to trunk.

We also had the usual collection of presentations about optimizations, runtime BOFs, new features and “lively discussion” over meals.  Good, geeky times were had by all.

By Diego Novillo, Compiler team

This week we have three more new Google Summer of Code organizations, MLton,  Buildroot and Privly, explaining their projects and what their students are currently working on.MLton is an open source, whole program, optimizing compiler for the Stan…

Today computers aren’t very good at understanding human language, and that forces people to do a lot of the heavy lifting—for example, speaking “searchese” to find information online, or slogging through lengthy forms to book a trip. Computers should understand natural language better, so people can interact with them more easily and get on with the interesting parts of life.

While state-of-the-art technology is still a ways from this goal, we’re making significant progress using the latest machine learning and natural language processing techniques. Deep learning has markedly improved speech recognition and image classification. For example, we’ve shown that computers can learn to recognize cats (and many other objects) just by observing large amount of images, without being trained explicitly on what a cat looks like. Now we apply neural networks to understanding words by having them “read” vast quantities of text on the web. We’re scaling this approach to datasets thousands of times larger than what has been possible before, and we’ve seen a dramatic improvement of performance — but we think it could be even better. To promote research on how machine learning can apply to natural language problems, we’re publishing an open source toolkit called word2vec that aims to learn the meaning behind words.

Word2vec uses distributed representations of text to capture similarities among concepts. For example, it understands that Paris and France are related the same way Berlin and Germany are (capital and country), and not the same way Madrid and Italy are. This chart shows how well it can learn the concept of capital cities, just by reading lots of news articles — with no human supervision:

The model not only places similar countries next to each other, but also arranges their capital cities in parallel. The most interesting part is that we didn’t provide any supervised information before or during training. Many more patterns like this arise automatically in training.

This has a very broad range of potential applications: knowledge representation and extraction; machine translation; question answering; conversational systems; and many others. We’re open sourcing the code for computing these text representations efficiently (on even a single machine) so the research community can take these models further.

We hope this helps connect researchers on machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language so they can create amazing real-world applications.

By Tomas Mikolov, Ilya Sutskever, and Quoc Le, Google Knowledge

We’re pleased to announce the open source release of the Gumbo HTML parser, a C implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm.One of the big accomplishments of the HTML5 standard was to standardize the HTML parsing algorithm, so that all browsers …

For the 8th post in our Google Summer of Code series highlighting the new open source organizations we are welcoming into this year’s program, we have organization administrators from LTTng, Constellation and PLASMA describing their student’s projects below.

The LTTng project (Linux Trace Toolkit – next generation) aims at providing highly efficient tracing tools for Linux. Its tracers help to track down performance issues and debugging problems involving multiple concurrent processes and threads. Tracing across multiple systems is also possible. Apart from LTTng’s kernel tracer and userspace tracer, viewing and analysis tools are also part of the project. LTTng’s performance relies on techniques such as Userspace RCU, lockless algorithms, per-cpu data structures and cache impact minimization. 

During Google Summer of Code 2013, our two students will work on the following projects:

• Zifei Tong will work on dynamic instrumentation support for the userspace tracer (UST). The current UST tracer relies on static tracepoint probes manually inserted in the traced application’s source code. This project aims at providing dynamic instrumentation capabilities in arbitrary applications. 

• Xiaona Han will work on improvement to the Babeltrace Python bindings. Most of the public Babeltrace API is currently mapped using SWIG. However, a more “Pythonic” set of wrapper classes will make trace reading and writing more accessible than using the current native API. 

By Christian Babeux, LTTng Organization Administrator 

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Constellation is a young academic group at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Our goal is to provide the creative environment for realization of different aerospace projects. As one branch the group offers a distributed supercomputing platform for solving aerospace related numerical problems. The massive computing power is provided by volunteers donating their idle computing time at home by forming a virtual super-computer via the internet. For this citizen space science method we are using the open source software called BOINC (Berkeley Open Interface for Network Computing). We are currently supported by 7,000 volunteers providing 20,000 host PCs to our computing grid where they help us optimize the thrust curve of a hybrid-engine sounding rocket by the student group HyEnD, and find a trajectory between Earth and the Earth-Moon-libration point EML-4 for the communication relay satellite mission TYCHO.

We are really honored to be part of this year’s Google Summer of Code, and we have three students working on diverse ideas. We try to find the optimum interplanetary trajectory for one probe to all eight planets in our solar system and Pluto with “Solar System Grand Tour”, which includes n-body simulation and implementing optimizing algorithms. We want to support flying observatories like SOFIA by NASA and DLR to maximize their observation times by optimizing flight routes with “airborne observatory”. And lastly, we want to excite children about space with an educational and fun “space trumps” card game for Android mobile devices, so that they will be involved in STEM professions when they grow up. This is the power of citizen science and open-source!

By Andreas Hornig, Constellation Organization Administrator

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PLASMA is a research group at the University of Massachusetts that works on a diverse array of projects that span the space of programming languages and systems. We are very excited to take part in Google Summer of Code for the first time! This summer we are fortunate to have three excellent students on board working on two of our projects, Doppio and CheckCell. 

Doppio is a Java Virtual Machine written in CoffeeScript that can run unmodified JVM programs in the browser — no plugins or recompilation required! Giles Lavelle is working on adding AWT and Swing support to Doppio, which will enable us to run GUI programs. Braden McDorman is adding networking support to Doppio using WebSockets, which will let JVM programs make use of the network through standard Java socket APIs. 

CheckCell is a tool for finding input data errors in spreadsheets. CheckCell combines statistical and program analysis techniques to find errors: values that have an unusually high influence on formulas or charts. These values are either extremely important, or are wrong. Our Google Summer of Code student, Alexandru Toader, is porting CheckCell from Microsoft Excel to Google Spreadsheet, allowing anyone with a modern web browser to use CheckCell online. 

By John Vilk, Daniel Barowy, and Emery Berger, PLASMA Organization Administrators

These are only a few of the new organizations participating in Google Summer of Code 2013. Stay tuned for our final posts over the next couple of weeks highlighting the remaining 40+ new organizations. A complete list of the 177 organizations mentoring students this year and the program timeline are available on the Google Summer of Code program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Open-source software has accelerated the pace of innovation in computing, leading to better products and services at lower cost. But as the impact of open-source software has grown, so too has the number of patent attacks against it.

In March, we announced an Open Patent Non-Assertion (OPN) Pledge—committing not to sue any user, distributor or developer of open-source software on specified patents, unless first attacked. Our goal was to encourage pro-competitive, defensive uses of patents to support open-source innovation.

Today we are pleased to pledge an additional 79 patents under the OPN. These patents cover software used to efficiently operate data centers, including middleware, distributed storage management, distributed database management, and alarm monitoring.

We acquired these patents from IBM and CA Technologies, companies that in 2005 were among the first to make open-source patent pledges. The goal of the patent system is to foster innovation, and we aim to use patents, whether acquired or developed internally, in support of that goal.

You can learn more about this second group of patents and the Pledge itself on our site, which we’ve also updated to make it easier to browse and download data on pledged patents.

To date, the patents we’ve included in the Pledge have generally related to “back-end” technologies: servers, data centers, and the like. But open-source software is also transforming the development of consumer products that people use every day—so stay tuned for additional extensions to patents covering those sorts of technologies.

By Duane Valz, Senior Patent Counsel

In our third and final series of statistic posts for 2013 Google Summer of Code, and back by popular demand, we have a list of all countries represented in the program this year. Get ready to scroll! There are students from 71 countries this year, comp…

We are halfway through Google Summer of Code 2013 and with the three projects below, we have now highlighted 20 of this year’s 40 new open source organizations in our weekly blog series.

The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) is a leading digital humanities center that pursues disciplinary innovation and institutional transformation through applied research, public programming, and educational opportunities. Jointly supported by the University of Maryland College of Arts and Humanities and the University of Maryland Libraries, MITH engages in collaborative, interdisciplinary work at the intersection of technology and humanistic inquiry. MITH specializes in text and image analytics for cultural heritage collections, data curation, digital preservation, linked data applications, and data publishing. 

We have two students working with us on Google Summer of Code projects. One student is working on a JavaScript library to engrave MEI-encoded music notation using VexFlow. Part of the work will be dedicated specifically to support variant handling, a distinctive feature of the MEI data model and an essential component of critical editions of musical works. Our second student is creating a set of demonstrations and coding infrastructure for MITHgrid, a JavaScript library we’ve been developing to support graph-based JavaScript applications in the browser, such as a video annotation toolkit and a Shared Canvas viewer. 

By James Smith, Organization Administrator for MITH 

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Motion planning is a key area in robotics that finds feasible paths for a robot from some initial state to some desired goal. Over the last couple of years we have developed a standard library for sampling-based motion planning algorithms, a class of algorithms that has been shown to work well on a large variety of systems, ranging from car-like robots to humanoid robots with many degrees of freedom. The Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) is designed to be very general; the library makes no assumptions about the type of robot or how the environment is represented. This allows it to be integrated into a larger robotics software system such as ROS. 

Manipulation Planning – An example of using OMPL on the PR2 from Willow Garage. The robot is asked to move and manipulate the objects on the table. The demo is using ROS. 

We are excited to have two very talented students working with us this summer. Caleb Voss is developing a plugin for Blender (a 3D modeling program) that allows one to plan motions for robots in environments drawn within Blender. The project integrates many different components, it relies on the Blender Game Engine to simulate physically realistic robot motion, on MORSE for robot models and high-level controllers, and on OMPL for planning. 

Luis Torres is working on a core future within OMPL – the representation of costs and the way planners optimize costs. There already exists some functionality in OMPL to optimize path length and some other common path properties, but in the redesign that Luis is working on this will be done in an abstract way so that the user can specify almost any kind of cost function. 

By Mark Moll, OMPL Organization Administrator

Today, August 2nd, is the deadline for midterm evaluations for students and mentors for Google Summer of Code 2013. To view a complete list of the 177 open source organizations that the 1192 students are working with this summer you can visit the Google Summer of Code program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

This week marks the halfway point of Google Summer of Code 2013. Both students and mentors will be submitting their midterm evaluations of one another through Friday, August 2 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 September 16th 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 September 23rd.

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