PRAGMA Student Hackathon: Topic 3
Topic (3) Applications that search, query, discover or generally mine biodiversity data through Lifemapper APIs
Resources:
Possible projects:
● New visualizations to summarize the contents of a Lifemapper datastore (archive) by species and time. The visualization will display the contents (species) and computation status (initialized, computed, error) of species archive. The search API allows aggregations and statistics to be searched and retrieved efficiently, which could be displayed in graphs, trees, maps, videos or any other visual method.
● New visualizations to provide related information to decide if new compute nodes are needed to calculate jobs for a Lifemapper Server instance. This visualization will query the archive to determine the speed of species additions, and job creation, in relationship to the speed of job computations. The search API allows aggregations and statistics to be computed efficiently, which could be displayed in graphs, trees, maps, videos or any other visual method.
Application
Who may apply
Undergraduate and master’s degree students are eligible to apply. Women and underrepresented minorities are especially encouraged to apply. Applicants who are interested in Topic 1 should have background on basic knowledge in Linux OS distributions (CentOS is preferred), computer networking, virtualizations (KVM), Software-Defined Networks (SDN), and familiar with command line interface. For Topic 2 and 3, applicants should have programming skills in PHP, Python or another scripting language, be familiar with web services, and have experience in design and implementation of visualization using Web technology. All applicants are encouraged to participate in collaborative idea development prior to applying (below).
Idea development and hackathon process
Hackathon projects are planned and executed by teams of 2 to 4 students. While the organizers provide topics of interest, the exact ideas for the projects come from you, the participants: rather than being decided in advance by the organizers. All participants will have an opportunity to get yourselves familiar with relevant materials of each topic. Teams and projects emerge by a guided self-organization process on the first day of the hackathon. This process is greatly aided if participants have sifted through ideas and identified potential team-mates in advance. We invite you to post ideas, and offer comments on others’ ideas on the hackathon discussion board (to be announced later). Participation in this process is not required, but is strongly encouraged.
Scoring and awards
Besides the goals mentioned above in terms of deliverables, this hackathon also aims for initiating and enabling collaboration among undergraduate and graduate students from local and international education institutes. We value participants in working together as a team and deliver their contribution and collaborating with other teams from different institutes and enlarge their contribution to the big picture as well. There are two different scoring criteria due to the natures of the topics:
● Topic 3:
o Work on Topic 3 will be scored and judged according to creativity and usability by experts.
Each team with a complete deliverable will receive a certification of accomplishment. In addition, the teams with the highest score in each topic will receive a cash award of 3,000 baht together with a hackathon most powerful contributor certificate. These teams will also present their accomplishments to PRAGMA researchers in the 31st PRAGMA Workshop, held in Bangkok, Thailand on Friday September 9th, 2016.
Application Process
Online applications (http://goo.gl/forms/o0ctrPtZ1HblxWpi1) will be considered through August 12, 2016, and invited applicants will be notified by August 19th. The application consists of contact information, a statement describing how your training and experience prepare you to participate successfully, and a short description of a potential project idea. Open-Source Requirement
All software produced at the hackathon will have an open source license, and will be developed in the open, with code on the GitHub public repository from the beginning of the event. Other non-software material developed during this hackathon will be openly licensed under CC-BY.
For more information
If you have questions about any aspect of this call for participation, feel free to contact:
● Putchong Uthayopas <pu@ku.ac.th>
● Chantana Chantrapornchai <chantana.c@ku.ac.th>