Re: HFOSS awarded National Science Foundation Grant

[Willie Walker <William Walker Sun COM>]

Hi All:

I attended the kick off and wrap up meetings for this and also helped 
them come to a decision about what to work on.  They are a great bunch 
of folks.

The things that came out of this were pretty positive:

* They created a different tracking technique for MouseTrap, which is 
based on following a colored shape versus needing to do facial 
recognition.  This speeds up the computation and also makes things a bit 
more precise.

* They created a plugin for canberra to provide visual effects for 
sounds.  They kind of poo-pooed the work because canberra only allows 
one plugin to work at a time (i.e., you can't use an audio plugin and a 
visual plugin at the same time), but I thought it was actually pretty good.

* All the students were satisfied with their experiences, and at least 
one said he wanted to continue his work.

One of the "to be improved" spaces would be better integration with the 
open source culture.  Part of the HFOSS program is to introduce students 
to the open source culture in general.  GNOME is more accommodating than 
many open source projects, but we could do more to help engage the 
students.  One thing I fear is that their work above might be lost and 
never checked in.  I need to follow up on this to see where things are 
and at least make sure they made it as a patch to a bug report somewhere.

In any case, I have a decent relationship with them now and I look 
forward to next year's participation.

Will

Stormy Peters wrote:
>   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:
>
>     * Expanding the HFOSS Chapter model to include new colleges and
>       universities for the project, initially through the summer
>       internship program.
>     * Developing an HFOSS Certificate program to recognize and certify
>       the educational achievements of students that participate in a
>       significant way in the program.
>     * Establishing a sustainable organizational and financial model that
>       will allow the project to function at a national level in
>       subsequent years. 
>
> For more information see 
> http://www.hfoss.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=25&cntnt01returnid=15 
> <http://www.hfoss.org/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=25&cntnt01returnid=15>.
>
> Stormy
>
>
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