Google Summer of Code

We plan to apply as a mentoring organization in 2016, with projects proposed and mentored by Open Ephys developers and users. Below is our initial project ideas list. The list will be updated until a few days before the mentoring application deadline on February 19, so please check back here for updates.

Get started:
Open Ephys is a volunteer-run organization that maintains open-source tools for the neuroscience community. The Open Ephys GUI, the software at the core of our open-source ecosystem, has been used to collect scientific data in hundreds of labs around the world. What makes open source neuroscience tools especially important is that the field is evolving so rapidly that scientists need to constantly devise new tools and experiments in order to run new experiments - Open Ephys makes this possible.

If you want to learn more about Open Ephys, check out our main website, this wiki, our google group, or just email us at info@open-ephys.org.

Proposals and ideas for potential Open Ephys projects within Google Summer of Code 2016:

1. Add plugin that interfaces with signal processing methods written in julia.
   Why etc
   
   
2. Add plugin generation module: GUI to auto-generate a plugin template given various parameter.
   Why etc
   
   Language: Almost anyhting cross-platform could work
   
   
3. Add plugin that handles triggered/time point aligned time-series data, and then applies analyses on it:
   3.1 Basic plugin should build on/refactor existing LFP viewer, and handle time series data, allow scrolling back trough past data
   3.2 Plugin should handle stacks of triggered time-point aligned data. This should be flexible enough to trigger only on certain events, and handle subsets of channels etc.
   3.3 Plugin should then apply analyses on the time-point aligned data: average+quantiles/std, time-frequency analysis, etc.
   
   
4. Add more granular channel handling functions and associated UI
   Why etc.
   
   
5. Use acceleremoter data for behaviour scoring.
   When running any type of experiment with freely behaving animals, it's often important to know what behaviour the animal is engaged in at any time. For instance mice could be walking around, eating, grooming, sleeping, standing up to explore some objects, etc. For some of these, capturing video is an easy way to get at the basic location of the animal, but for determining whether a mouse is sitting still or sleeping or eating is very hard with cameras. However, most of the head-stages that Open Ephys users would use on these experiments come with small accelerometers that give constantly sampled 3d- acceleration data. Mining this data to determine the behavioural state of the animal (mice or rats) in real-time would enable scientists to perform much more targeted experiments.
   
   Language: Basic data interface in C++, data processing and machine learning could be python, julia, or use any C++ libraries.
   
   
6. Real time-ish sleep scoring
   Why etc.
   
   
7. openBCI integration, maybe together with sleepscoring
   Why etc.