Google Data

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

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

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

By Scott Hunter, Cesium Organization Administrator 

----- 

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

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

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

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

By Ryan Curtin, mlpack Organization Administrator 

----- 

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

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

By Markus Blatt, DUNE Organization Administrator

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

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs