ACADEMIA

A program funded by search giant Google is giving six students from around the world the opportunity to work with NCSA's expert staff this summer. The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program provides financial support to enable student developers to write code for a wide range of open-source software projects. Six students from Brazil, China, Poland, Sri Lanka, and the United States were selected from dozens of applicants and will be mentored by NCSA staff as they work on R&D projects ranging from medical imaging to environmental monitoring to cybersecurity. "Many of the students who applied to work on projects from NCSA through GSoC were very excited to find that their work would be applied in efforts in environmental science, medicine, history, and disaster response," says Jim Myers, who leads NCSA's Cyberenvironments and Technologies Directorate. "In addition to providing students with experience in open-source development, I hope we convey the excitement of directly contributing to teams working to understand important scientific problems and to address critical challenges facing society."

• Joana M. F. da Trindade from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil is working with Tom Scavo. Her project aims to develop SAML holder-of-key authentication, a stronger security standard that virtually eliminates the impersonation threat associated with bearer assertions.
• Kang Zhang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, is being mentored by Myers. Zhang will use Adobe AIR to build a client for semantic data management based on NCSA's Tupelo protocol.
• Piotr Wendykier, a PhD student at Emory University who is spending the summer in Poland, will be mentored by Peter Bajcsy. He is working on parallel implementation of an automated image cropping algorithm for processing terabytes of data—specifically, the collected writings of President Abraham Lincoln papers.
• Upeksha Uduwilaarachchi and Sachith Dhanushka, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, are working on mapping geospatial and temporal information to and from KML (a file format used to display geographic data). Their mentor is Yong Liu and their project is part of NCSA's contributions to the WATERS (Water and Environmental Research Systems) Network, a long-range effort to build a comprehensive system for monitoring and understanding the complex and dynamic water cycle.
• Renee McElhaney, a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), is also working with Bajcsy, who is working with a group of UIC physicians on bioinformatics problems related to a procedure for patients with diabetes. McElhaney is assisting Bajcsy with the design of algorithms for dealing with a variety of data collected before and after each islet transplant in order to predict the outcome of the procedure.
• Conrad Owen, Hampton University, will be mentored by Luigi Marini. He is working on a tool to help scientists view and manipulate large datasets quickly and easily.

"Working with students like Joana is a hugely rewarding experience," Scavo says. "Students generally have no concept of what is a hard problem, which gives them a distinct advantage. My job, as a mentor, is to get out of the way and let the natural enthusiasm and creativity of the student shine through."