The Google Summer of Code program provides a stipend for students who want to spend a summer contributing code to open-source projects. Open Ephys is applying as a mentoring organization in 2016. Below is a list of projects that would be extremely beneficial to our user base, and could be completed in a 12-week period.
Getting started
If you're new to Open Ephys, we recommend reading through our main website, this wiki, and our google group, or just email info@open-ephys.org and let us know what you'd like to learn more about.
Application instructions
Open Ephys is looking for students to help us improve our GUI (http://www.open-ephys.org/gui/), an open-source data acquisition application used by neuroscientists across the globe. As a participant in GSoC, you'll have the opportunity to contribute code that will be applied to real experiments, as well as to learn the scientific motivations that drove us to create the GUI.
The only prerequisite is proficiency in C++, as demonstrated through coursework, code samples, and discussions with potential mentors. Experience with signal processing, data visualization, and/or the Juce framework are helpful, but not necessary. Our software runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, so you'll be able to work with the OS of your choice.
To apply, please send a resume, a link to your GitHub page, and a letter describing the project(s) you're interested in working on to info@open-ephys.org. Bonus points if you've already squashed some bugs listed at https://github.com/open-ephys/gui/issues
Proposal ideas
Below is a list of potential projects for GSoC students. This is just a subset of the many possibilities, so feel free to suggest your own ideas as well. This list will also be useful for anyone else that's looking for ways to contribute to the GUI.
1. Julia plugin module
Description: Description goes here.
Skills required: List skills
Mentor: Jakob Voigts (@jvoigts)
2. Triggered-averaging module
Description: Description goes here.
Skills required: List skills
Mentor: Josh Siegle (@jsiegle)
3. Plugin generation GUI
Description: Basic plugin should build on/refactor existing LFP viewer, and handle time series data, allow scrolling back trough past data. 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. Plugin should then apply analyses on the time-point aligned data: average+quantiles/std, time-frequency analysis, etc.
Skills required: List skills
Mentor: Josh Siegle (@jsiegle)
4. Behavior scoring with accelerometer data
Description: 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.
Skills required: Proficiency in C++, plus knowledge of machine learning algorithms (to be implemented in Python, Julia, or C++)
Mentor: Jakob Voigts (@jvoigts)
5. OpenBCI integration
Description: Description goes here.
Skills required: List skills
Mentor: Josh Siegle (@jsiegle)