I am proud and happy that 7 students of the NUI Group community have been selected for Google Summer of Code 2008.

Find below the blog post of NUI colleague Pawel Solyga, regarding this event. Pawel will together with several other NUI colleagues, mentor these students.

Final results! Google Summer of Code 2008 NUI Group students 21 Apr08

Competition

The time has come The list of accepted students to the Google Summer of Code has just been published on GSoC webpage and on Google Open Source blog here. We have been amazed by amount of proposals we received (42+) and overall quality of the applications have been outstanding. It was an extremely hard choice for us to select the best ones. We are also surprised by the amount of slots we got from Google. It’s our first time in Google Summer of Code as mentoring organization and I’m happy to say that we’ve received 7 slots! That means that 7 great proposals have been selected and we are looking forward to work with selected students starting from today and during the summer
Here is the final list of accepted projects for GSoC 2008:

Open source, multi‐touch based application for teaching of basic concepts of Physics
Student: Stanislaw Zabramski
Mentor: Dr. Johannes Hirche

TUIO Simulator
Student: Ashish Kumar Rai
Mentor: Paweł Sołyga

A general purpose infrastructure for multitouch gesture recognition management
Student: Alessandro De Nardi
Mentor: Mikael Bauer

Implementing video processing for blob tracking on the GPU
Student: Thomas Hansen
Mentor: Mikael Bauer

NUI Touch Framework Application
Student: Seth Sandler
Mentor: Christian Moore

Enhanced human computer interface through webcam image processing library
Student: Daniel Lélis Baggio
Mentor: Paweł Sołyga

Mac OSX Opentouch Conversion
Student: Mantas Vidutis
Mentor: Paweł Sołyga

I would like to encourage all of you to read this blog post, whether you are on the list or not. I think this is “must read” for all of you. Hopefully this will help you understand how difficult it is to select best projects from the ones that we received. We had a really hard time doing evaluation/rating process and choosing those best 7.

Student and the Google Summer of Code: What is Next?

I would like to thank everyone who applied for GSoC 2008 this year. You are just amazing! If you’re not on the list don’t hesitate to work on your project anyway. It’s open source, you don’t have to be in GSoC to start your own project. If you’re passionate about your proposal and NUI Group - stay in touch, contribute to community, work with us and let’s make things happen together. Thank you once again!

Some information for selected students. If you have been accepted and you’re still not submitted to the NUI Group GSoC discussion group, please do so. Here is the link http://groups.google.com/group/nuigroup-gsoc. We will use this list to communicate with you, share experience, share ideas, keep track of work and also to get to know each other. If you are an IRC guy remember about joining our #nuigroup channel at Freenode. Congratulations to all selected students !!! Great work, keep it that way!

You can find the official list of accepted NUI Group students here.