2016 Google Summer of Code mentor organizations

It’s that time of year again! We are pleased to announce the mentor organizations accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Every year, we have many more great projects than we can accept — 2016 was no exception. After carefully reviewing 369 applications, we have chosen 180 open source projects, 24% of which are new to the program. Please see our new program website for a complete list of the accepted orgs.

Over the next two weeks, students interested in participating in GSoC can research each of the organizations. The student application period begins on Monday, March 14, 2016 at 19:00 UTC and ends on Friday, March 25, 2016 at 19:00 UTC.

Interested? Start by reviewing the Ideas List from each organization to learn about the organization and how you might contribute. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea to the organization! There are contacts listed for each organization on their Ideas List — students should contact the organization directly to discuss a new proposal. We also strongly encourage all interested students to reach out to and become familiar with the organization before applying.

For more information, visit our website for a full timeline of important dates and program milestones. We also highly recommend all potential students read the student manual and the FAQ’s.

Congratulations to all of our mentor organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during Google Summer of Code 2016!

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs

Google Code-in 2015: diving into the numbers

Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up a few weeks ago with our largest contest to date: 980 students from 65 countries completed a record-breaking 4,776 tasks! Working with 14 open source organizations, students wrote code, created and edited documentation, designed UI elements and logos, conducted research, developed screencasts and videos teaching others about open source software, and helped find (and fix!) hundreds of bugs.

General statistics

• 57% of students completed three or more tasks (earning themselves a sweet Google Code-in 2015 t-shirt)
• 21% of students were female, up from 18% in 2014
• This was the first Google Code-in for 810 students (83%)

Student age

Participating schools

Students from 550 schools competed in this year’s contest. Below are the top five participating schools.

School Name	Number of student participants	Country	Website
Dunman High School	147	Singapore	http://www.dhs.sg
GSS PU College	44	India	http://gssbgm.edu.in
Colegiul National Aurel Vlaicu	31	Romania	http://www.colegiulavlaicu.ro
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School	28	India	http://www.shcsjagadhri.org
Freehold High School	10	United States	http://frhsd.com/freehold

Countries

The charts below display the top ten countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.

Country	Number of student participants
India	246
United States	224
Singapore	164
Romania	65
Canada	24
Taiwan	22
Poland	19
United Kingdom	18
Australia	17
Germany	13

We are pleased to have 11 new countries participating in GCI this year: Albania, Armenia, Cameroon, Costa Rica (home to one of this year’s grand prize winners!), Cyprus, Georgia, Guatemala, Laos, Luxembourg, Qatar and Uganda.

In June we will welcome all 28 grand prize winners (along with a mentor from each participating organization) for a fun-filled trip to the Bay Area. The trip will include meeting with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, a tour of the Google campus and a day of sightseeing around San Francisco.  

Stay tuned to our blog for more stats on Google Code-in, including wrap up posts from the mentor organizations. We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more passionate teens to the world of open source software development.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Program Manager

EarlGrey: iOS functional UI testing framework

Brewing for quite some time, we are excited to announce EarlGrey, a functional UI testing framework for iOS. Several Google apps like YouTube, Google Calendar, Google Photos, Google Translate, Google Play Music and many more have successfully adopted the framework for their functional testing needs.

The key features offered by EarlGrey include:

• Powerful built-in synchronization : Tests will automatically wait for events such as animations, network requests, etc. before interacting with the UI. This will result in tests that are easier to write (no sleeps or waits) and simple to maintain (straight up procedural description of test steps).
• Visibility checking : All interactions occur on elements that users can see. For example, attempting to tap a button that is behind an image will lead to test failure immediately.
• Flexible design : The components that determine element selection, interaction, assertion and synchronization have been designed to be extensible.

Are you in need for a cup of refreshing EarlGrey? EarlGrey has been open sourced under the Apache license. Check out the getting started guide and add EarlGrey to your project using CocoaPods or manually add it to your Xcode project file.

By Siddartha Janga, on behalf of Google iOS Developers

Running your models in production with TensorFlow Serving

Machine learning powers many Google product features, from speech recognition in the Google app to Smart Reply in Inbox to search in Google Photos. While decades of experience have enabled the software industry to establish best practices for building and supporting products, doing so for services based upon machine learning introduces new and interesting challenges. Today, we announce the release of TensorFlow Serving, designed to address some of these challenges. TensorFlow Serving is a high performance, open source serving system for machine learning models, designed for production environments and optimized for TensorFlow.

TensorFlow Serving is ideal for running multiple models, at large scale, that change over time based on real-world data, enabling:

• model lifecycle management
• experiments with multiple algorithms
• efficient use of GPU resources

TensorFlow Serving makes the process of taking a model into production easier and faster. It allows you to safely deploy new models and run experiments while keeping the same server architecture and APIs. Out of the box it provides integration with TensorFlow, but it can be extended to serve other types of models. Here’s how it works. In the simplified, supervised training pipeline shown below, training data is fed to the learner, which outputs a model:

Once a new model version becomes available, upon validation, it is ready to be deployed to the serving system, as shown below.

TensorFlow Serving uses the (previously trained) model to perform inference - predictions based on new data presented by its clients. Since clients typically communicate with the serving system using a remote procedure call (RPC) interface, TensorFlow Serving comes with a reference front-end implementation based on gRPC, a high performance, open source RPC framework from Google. It is quite common to launch and iterate on your model over time, as new data becomes available, or as you improve the model. In fact, at Google, many pipelines run continuously, producing new model versions as new data becomes available.

TensorFlow Serving is written in C++ and it supports Linux. TensorFlow Serving introduces minimal overhead. In our benchmarks we recoded ~100,000 queries per second (QPS) per core on a 16 vCPU Intel Xeon E5 2.6 GHz machine, excluding gRPC and the TensorFlow inference processing time. We are excited to share this important component of TensorFlow today under the Apache 2.0 open source license. We would love to hear your questions and feature requests on Stack Overflow and GitHub respectively. To get started quickly, clone the code from github.com/tensorflow/serving and check out this tutorial. You can expect to keep hearing more about TensorFlow as we continue to develop what we believe to be one of the best machine learning toolboxes in the world. If you'd like to stay up to date, follow @googleresearch or +ResearchatGoogle, and keep an eye out for Jeff Dean's keynote address at GCP Next 2016 in March.

Posted by Noah Fiedel, Software Engineer 

Mentor Organization applications are now being accepted for Google Summer of Code 2016

Our 12th year of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has officially begun! GSoC is a global program focused on bringing more student developers into open source software development. Students work with an open source organization on a three month programming project during their break from university.

Do you represent a free or open source software organization looking for new contributors? Do you love the challenge and reward of mentoring new developers in your community? Apply to be a mentor organization for GSoC! Starting today we will be accepting applications from open source projects who would like to serve as mentor organizations for enthusiastic student developers.

The deadline to apply is February 19 at 19:00 UTC. Organizations chosen for GSoC 2016 will be announced via the program site on February 29.

Please visit our new program site page for more information on how to apply, a detailed timeline of important deadlines and general program information. We also encourage you to check out the Mentor Manual or join the discussion group. Best of luck to all of our mentor organization applicants!

By Mary Radomile, Open Source Programs

Announcing the Google Code-in 2015 winners

Congratulations are in order to all of the participants of Google Code-in (GCI) 2015. This was the largest GCI yet with 980 students from 65 countries completing an impressive 4,776 tasks.

The Winners and Finalists chosen by the 14 open source organizations are listed below. They completed a total of 1,536 tasks and are from 24 countries and six continents!

First is a list of our Grand Prize winners. Each of these 28 students will be treated to a trip to California to visit the Google campus for four days this summer to meet with Google engineers and enjoy some fun in San Francisco.

GRAND PRIZE WINNERS

Name	Organization	Country
Ahmed Sabie	Systers	Canada
Andrew Haberlandt	Wikimedia	United States
Anesu Mafuvadze	SCoRe	United States
Aun-Ali Zaidi	RTEMS	United States
Brayan Alfaro González	SCoRe	Costa Rica
Břetislav Hájek	OpenMRS	Czech Republic
Bror Hultberg	Apertium	Germany
Caroline Gschwend	MetaBrainz	United States
Daniyaal Rasheed	Ubuntu	United States
Ethan Ordentlich	RTEMS	United States
Ezequiel Pereira Lopez	Sugar Labs	Uruguay
Hannah Pan	Haiku	United States
Imran Tatriev	KDE	Kazakhstan
Ioannis Kydonis	Wikimedia	Greece
Jason Wong	FOSSASIA	United States
Kinshuk Kashyap	Copyleft Games Group	India
Matthew Allen	Ubuntu	Australia
Ohm Patel	MetaBrainz	United States
Piotr Antosz	Sugar Labs	Poland
Russell Greene	KDE	United States
S. Sai Vineet	Apertium	India
Sara Du	Systers	United States
Starbuck Johnson	Copyleft Games Group	United States
Sudhanshu Gautam	Drupal	India
Suryansh Singh	Drupal	India
Victor Tolpegin	Haiku	United States
Yamandú Bermúdez	OpenMRS	Uruguay
Yathannsh Kulshreshtha	FOSSASIA	India

And below are the 42 Finalists. These students will each receive a digital certificate of completion, a sweet Google Code-in t-shirt and hooded sweatshirt.

FINALISTS

Name	Organization	Country
Aashir Shukla	SCoRE	India
Adrián Arroyo Calle	Haiku	Spain
Akshaykumar Kalose	Drupal	United States
Alex Chen	OpenMRS	China
Andrey Cygankov	KDE	Russian Federation
Anshuman Agarwal	FOSSASIA	India
Artur Puzio	KDE	Poland
Austin Jenchi	Copyleft Games Group	United States
Cristian García	Sugar Labs	Uruguay
Daksh Shah	Sugar Labs	India
Divya Prakash Mittal	MetaBrainz	India
Ethan Chi	Apertium	United States
Evan McIntire	Ubuntu	United States
Geoffrey Mon	Wikimedia	United States
Girish Rawat	Ubuntu	India
Henry Dang	Systers	United States
Isaac Hutt	Wikimedia	United Kingdom
Ishan Joshi	Systers	Australia
Jaeeun (Jasmine) Park	Sugar Labs	Philippines
Justin Du	Wikimedia	United States
Lee Yang Peng	Apertium	Singapore
Liam Greenlee	RTEMS	United States
Lucas Jones	SCoRE	United Kingdom
Malena Vasquez Currie	Ubuntu	Argentina
Markus Himmel	Haiku	Germany
Matthew Marting	Apertium	United States
Muhammad Yasoob Ullah Khalid	FOSSASIA	Pakistan
Nji Collins	OpenMRS	Cameroon
Nurul Ariessa Norramli	MetaBrainz	Malaysia
Petr Martynov	Drupal	Russian Federation
Philip Lindner	SCoRE	Germany
Phillip Llewellyn	Drupal	Jamaica
Phoebe Fletcher	Systers	United Kingdom
Ralph Holmes	RTEMS	United Kingdom
Rishav Kundu	Copyleft Games Group	India
Stanford Lin	KDE	Canada
Stanisław Szcześniak	MetaBrainz	Poland
Stephanie Fu	Haiku	United States
Syed Ahmed	OpenMRS	Canada
Tan Gemicioglu	RTEMS	Turkey
Václav Šraier	Copyleft Games Group	Czech Republic
Yago González	FOSSASIA	Spain

Thank you to all of the students, mentors and organization administrators who made Google Code-in 2015 our biggest and best yet. The organizations were impressed with the quality of work and enthusiasm from the students. We hope the students had fun learning more about open source and will continue to contribute to these communities.

Stay tuned for more blog posts with statistics from GCI 2015, including a breakdown of the top participating schools, countries of students and mentors, as well as wrap-ups from some students and organizations.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs