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

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

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

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

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

By John Woods, SciRuby Organization Administrator 

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

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

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

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

By Jeff Warren, Public Lab Organization Administrator 

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

We have two students working with us this summer.   

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

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

By Thomas Bonte, Co-founder & CEO MuseScore

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

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs