The HFOSS project has received another round of funding
from the National Science Foundation that will support their activities through
August 2011.
The HFOSS project stimulates interest in the computer science major by getting students involved in humanitarian free software projects. Last year three of the students worked on GNOME projects along with mentors from the GNOME accessibility team. From http://blog.hfoss.org/?p=90:
The GNOME accessibility team (Foster Nichols, Ryan Gee, Rachel Foecking) worked on two projects: MouseTrap, a program that moves the mouse cursor using webcam tracking, and VizAudio, an alert system that replaces sound effects with visual effects. The team worked with developers from GNOME accessibility project, Flavio Percoco Premoli Rohan Anil and Bryen Yunashko, located in Italy, India and California respectively. VizAudio is written in C as a backend for the libcanberra sound library. MouseTrap is written in Python and uses OpenCV (the open source computer vision library) for image processing. “Accessibility projects are important, especially for a program like HFOSS. We hope that future HFOSS interns will continue to work with GNOME on accessibility, and that HFOSS will look to start accessibility projects on other platforms, and keep accessibility in mind for all of their projects.”
The NSF awarded approximately $800,000 (the maximum for this type of CPATH II grant) to the three sponsoring schools, Trinity College, Wesleyan University, and Connecticut College. This will enable HFOSS to pursue its three main goals over the next two years: