Google Data

For our second year participating in Google Summer of Code, Computational Science and Engineering at TU Wien successfully mentored nine students. A total of 37 mentors from five different faculties worked with the students, sharing their passion in their area of research.

Tim Jerman was working on a RAW loader for nomacs.org. He successfully improved and extended the RAW processing with an additional post-processing that reduces chromatic noise. His image manipulation toolbox allows users to enhance their images manually, including gamma correction, exposure compensation, and saturation manipulation.

Fedor Morozov implemented HDR imaging for nomacs.org that allows for displaying, reading, and writing the most common HDR file formats such as .hdr, .exr, and .pic. In addition, he added a converter for creating HDR images from multiple LDR images.

Jan Kis worked on the parallelization of OpenPixi, a physics simulation for electromagnetic plasmas. A large part of the work was devoted to designing a parallel scheme for exchanging field and particle information between neighboring nodes of the simulation. Parallelization was implemented in Java using the IBIS portability layer project. The new framework allows for various types of boundaries including hard wall and periodic boundary conditions. The good performance of the final code was demonstrated on the Vienna Scientific Cluster.

Benjamin Venditti and Thomas Perl made fantastic progress on the MoveOnPC project. They implemented a library for tracking multiple PS Move controllers robustly on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac and Meego). Now a variety of cameras can be used (PS Eye, webcams, up to HD 1080p cameras) for optical tracking. Various language bindings (C, Python, Java, Processing and C#) provide flexibility in the use of the developed PS Move API. Benjamin Venditti focused on the computer vision part of the project and implemented a robust color calibration and optical tracking algorithm with OpenCV. His developments are described on the MoveOnPC blog. Thomas Perl focused on reading and fusing sensor data, hardware programming, and implementing all language bindings and creating examples. His progress is documented on this MoveOnPC project page, where his master thesis summarizing his work on the MoveOnPC project is available.

Joseph Boudou worked on the Skeptik project improving and developing state of the art algorithms for the compression of propositional resolution proofs generated by automated deduction tools, particularly SAT-solvers and SMT-solvers. He has become a regular contributor to our project, and his work has been so successful that the results of his work are going to be submitted to a major conference.

Harald Hofstätter implemented a server for the upcoming interface standard, OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA). By integration into the Monitoring System Toolkit a number of software tools can now access data of sensors and actors in buildings in real-time.

Volodymyr Kysenko worked on a GPU-accelerated solver for the generalized eigenvalue problem in ViennaCL. He also contributed code for computing the singular value decomposition of a matrix and presented a paper about work, that was initiated during Google Summer of Code 2011, at the NLDB 2012 conference in Groningen.

Alexander Kowarik worked on integrating C++ code for the R package sdcMicro. Because of his work, now all methods of this state-of-the-art package on statistical disclosure control are well optimized to work on large data sets. In addition, he revised the point-and-click interface of the package so that also non R-users have the possibility to anonymize their data.

All of us at TU Wien were very pleased with the progress our Google Summer of Code students made, and wish them every success going forward.

By Karl Rupp, Computational Science and Engineering at TU Wien Organization Administrator and team