Difference between revisions of "GSOC Project Ideas 2017"

Revision as of 17:20, 8 February 2017

There are plenty of challenging and interesting project ideas this year. These projects include a broad set of skills, technologies, and domains, such as GUIs, database integration and algorithms.

Students are also encouraged to propose their own ideas related to our projects. If you have strong computer skills and have an interest in biology or bioinformatics, you should definitely apply! Do not hesitate to propose your own project idea: some of the best applications we see are by students that go this route. As long as it is relevant to one of our projects, we will give it serious consideration. Creativity and self-motivation are great traits for open source programmers.

• Project Idea Name (Project Name/Lab Name)
  • Brief explanation: Brief description of the idea, including any relevant links, etc.
  • Expected results: describe the outcome of the project idea.
  • Knowledge prerequisites: programming language(s) to be used, plus any other particular computer science skills needed.
  • Skill level: Basic, Medium or Advanced.
  • Mentors: name + contact details of the lead mentor, name + contact details of backup mentor.

Here is a list of the proposed project ideas for 2017:

• 1. Project Publication Reference Tracking (Galaxy)
  • Brief explanation: Open source projects need ways to demonstrate relevance and viability to funders, users, and developers. One way to do that is to track publications that use and/or reference a project's products. This is typically done through setting up email alerts or RSS feeds from sources (Google Scholar, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, ...) This effort would create software that helps projects track publications that reference them.
  • Expected results: The software would integrate notifications from many sources into a coherent list of publications, report which ones are not yet known, and provide support for adding new ones to online reference managers such as CiteULike and Mendeley. The software would be extensible to make it easy to add support for new sources of publications and to support many online references managers. The software would be usable by any project to create and maintain publication lists.
  • Knowledge prerequisites: Python or Java experience is preferred, as those are the languages of choice of the two mentor projects.
  • Skill level: Basic
  • Mentors: Dave Clements, Galaxy Project, Johns Hopkins University, clements@galaxyproject.org, Robin Haw, Reactome, Ontario Institute for Cancer Research.

• Project Idea 2: Reactome Diagrams WebGL (Reactome)
  • Brief explanation: Implementing WebGL support in the renderer layer of Reactome's new DiagramViewer (https://github.com/reactome-pwp/diagram) using the Parallax project (http://parallax3d.org/) or similar.
  • Expected results: Faster renderings, nicer and smoother transitions, overlay more data in any zoom level, use of textures to make pathway elements more realistic and ending up having a multi-platform WebGL support.
  • Knowledge prerequisites: Java, GWT, GIT, MAVEN, HTML5 Canvas, WebGL.
  • Skill level: Medium-Advanced.
  • Mentor: Antonio Fabregat (fabregat@ebi.ac.uk) (lead mentor), Kostas Sidiropoulos (ksidiro@ebi.ac.uk) (backup mentor)

• Project Idea 3: iOS InterMine App
  • Brief explanation: InterMine already has an Android application that allow users to search for genes across most of the 29 public InterMine instances, with a well documented API (http://iodocs.apps.intermine.org/). We’d love to see this reflected in an iOS application, designed using HTML5 or native technologies. As a minimum we'd like to see the Android app features replicated whilst querying a single re-badgeable InterMine. A great stretch goal would be to query multiple mines simultaneously.
  • Knowledge prerequisites:
    • iOS app development, whether native or HTML5 based.
    • Understanding of working with REST APIs.
    • Biology knowledge an advantage, but not required.
    • Git or other version control
  • Mentors:
    • Yo yo@intermine.org
    • Josh josh@intermine.org
  • Expected results: an iOS application with functionality similar to https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.intermine.app that is ready to be submitted to the Apple store.
  • Skill level: Medium.