GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2014

Portland State University

License: MIT license

Web Page: http://summer.cs.pdx.edu/ideas

Mailing List: psu-soc-2014-info@svcs.cs.pdx.edu

We're the Portland State University Google Summer of Code team. We've participated in the past eight years of this fine activity. During this time, we've successfully mentored 61 students through projects in a variety of areas ranging from the immediately practical to the forward-looking esoteric. Our specialty is projects that clearly benefit the student, the open source community, and society in general, but have no obvious fit in the standard mentoring organizations. In particular, we tend to focus on small-scale or individual risky-but-promising open source "seed" projects that we think will grow into something great. We also do well with students whose coding projects have an academic bent. We often mentor projects in the technology end of the open source space, including hardware/software systems work with a solid code component. We have also partnered with other organizations, including Weave, SymPy and Washington State University, to mentor their students while they prepare for the GSoC org admissions process. One of our strengths is the ability to track down mentors for a wide variety of different kinds of activity. Portland, Oregon is an amazing place, and we're lucky to have access to a strong, diverse open source community.

Projects

  • A routability-driven placer for Printed Circuit Board design The aim of this project is to develop a routibility-driven placer that would be used as a standalone tool for autoplacing PCB components considering optimization of routability. Once the circuit design is made by PCB design tool, the design file would be imported to the placer for autoplacing the components. The final output file would be exported to the PCB tool again for further designing. This placer would be integrated with KiCAD software suite for autoplcaing the components in PCB design.
  • Display of subsurface features in a virtual world The project aims at enabling the display of subsurface features, in addition to just the regular surface features. It would make the visualisation of subsurface data easier. Initially in the project, we would focus on only one or two datasets of different scales and regional extents that have negative elevation and plot them in the subsurface.
  • Expanding WebWork: Quantitative Biology and Partial Differential Equations WeBWorK is an open-source online homework system for math and sciences courses. The WeBWorK Open Problem Library (OPL) is a collection of 25000 problems. Each problem is coded in a perl derived language. I noticed that partial differential equations and Biomathematics are missing on the OPL. Nowadays Biology has turned more quantitative. I believe that math problems with real data must be available as free software for teachers and students around the world.
  • GeoDjango LIMS Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) facilitate workflows and provide reliable sample and data tracking for laboratory environments. As demands evolve the concept of a LIMS is expanding. There are no open source LIMS currently available that offer spatial functionality. Developing a mapping platform within a LIMS for analysis of sample locations will introduce a powerful data mining tool for its users.
  • GSOC'14: Automotive Engine Management Based on ARM Processors An exploration of Texas Instrument’s PRU cores and RTLinux in automotive engine management
  • InfoMaps with a Single Record View The University of Massachusetts Lowell has been developing Weave, a web-based visualization and analysis platform (www.iweave.org), over the past five and a half years. What I propose to do is move the current prototype Weave InfoMaps implementation into releasable code. InfoMaps allows for the viewing and organizing multiple queries from a text corpus. I plan to refine the interface and user experience and also extend it to work with a single record view.
  • Orthorectifying EM data in reference to a thin section image As an extension to the previous project, the aim of the project is used to overlay the images spatially using different GIS tools. We are given a EM data and a thin section image and asked to reference the images.As we have a EM data(which is a high resolution image), we need to make sure that the base layer(image) can be made to geo-reference the points. So, for this to be clear we will be using jQuery for zoom levels so that the user can point-out the coordiantes more easily and accurately.
  • Simultaneous Suicide Detection for Chinese "Twitter", Sina Weibo Chinese people get more and more pressure from society or family. Some of them feel too upset and commit suicide. During this process, some will post Sina weibo(same as Twitter) to express their emotions. Or even, many people broadcast their suicide! To prevent this terrible situation, I want to build a suicide alert system to save their life. As soon as the system detect the suicide tendency, it will notice psychological associations, then these associations will contact with this person.
  • Thin Section Mineral Identification and Petrographic analysis A Python Library of functions that will use machine learning to automate the identification of mineral grains, which grains are similar in composition and which very by trace minerals (for example which grain is biotite or plagioclase or olivine and which ones have more titanium or other elements), and a description of the grain variation in size-composition that will talk about the petrology of the sample (if it has large crystals, porphyritic composition, what percentage is ground mass, etc).
  • User Interface widgets for LANDIS II simulation model LANDIS-II is a forest landscape model simulating forest succession, disturbance, climate change, and seed dispersal across large landscapes. LANDIS-II is used by scientists worldwide to evaluate and predict forest landscape dynamics in our changing world. LANDIS-II can only be used for one scenario at a time through a command prompt. Adding Scenario Launcher, Scenario Replicator, and Scenario Builder UI widgets to the tool will increase the approachability and usability of the application..
  • Web-based analytic framework for multivariate analyses of ’omics’ data At the Institute of Perception and Visualization Research (IVPR),we are looking to develop a web-based framework, interfaces and architecture to communicate with external analytical platforms. With this ability genomic analytical platforms can be harnessed and computational results ultimately analyzed visually using our Web-based Analytic and Visualization Environment (Weave), a high performance, open source, interactive visualization and analysis also being developed at the IVPR since 2008.