Open Source Research Experience

 

CROSS values diversity and inclusion in all our projects. We invite students from traditionally excluded groups in tech and open source communities to apply to this program. Due to the open source nature of all CROSS projects, contributions are welcomed from both UC Santa Cruz and non-UC Santa Cruz students. CROSS is partnering with the Baskin Engineering Inclusive Excellence Hub to increase our ability to reach a more diverse pool of students and mentors.

CROSS also accepts project ideas from mentors (UC faculty, researchers and PhD students) not currently supported by CROSS. All projects must be open source to be considered for this program. See information for interested mentors below. 

Industry partners and other sponsors are welcome to support this program by signalling their interest in particular project idea portfolios. Sponsors support is used directly to fund these student summer internships. CROSS fellows will invite sponsoring organizations to participate in a blend of open source software strategies with graduate-level research in a concentrated environment of mentorship, including the opportunity to meet and interact with students and mentors, and an invitation to an end-of-summer presentation where they will show off the results of their work.

An overview of the sponsorship framework for the 2021 summer program is available. The 2022 framework is available here.

 

Highlights from Previous Programs

2020      2021

See also GSoC participation 2018 and 2019

OSRE 2021

Student	School	Project Title	CROSS project	Products	Mentors
Jesse Chen	UC Santa Cruz	Alpine, macOS support	livehd	Final Report Lightning Talk	Jose Renau, Sheng-hong Wang, Sakshi Garg
Yash Jipkate	IIT (BHU), Varanasi	Port wiki to ReadTheDocs or another documentation platform	skyhookdm	Final Report	Jayjeet Chakraborty, Ivo Jimenez
Rupal Sharma	Indian Institute of Technology, BHU	Path finding algorithm using OpenCV	osavc	Final Report Lightning Talk	Aaron Hunter, Pavlo Vlastos
Mishal Singhai	LNMIIT	Object Centric Data Storage PDC_CEPH RADOS INTEGRATION	skyhookdm	Final Report Lightning Talk	Suren Byna, Jayjeet Chakraborty, Houjun Tang
Rishikesh Vanarse	BITS Pilani (Goa)	IMU Calibration & Self-Correction Algorithm for Open Source Autonomous Vehicle Controller	osavc	Final Report Lightning Talk	Aaron Hunter, Pavlo Vlastos

Rahul Agarwal	IIT Kharagpur, India	Facilitate continuous benchmarking/regression testing for the critical components of SkyhookDM	skyhookdm	Final Report Lightning Talk	Jayjeet Chakraborty, Carlos Maltzahn
Carlos Espinosa	UC Santa Cruz	Dynamic Model and Control Design of a Quadrotor using Simulink	osacv	Final Report (Technical) Final Report (FARR)*	Aaron Hunter, Pavlo Vlastos, Stephanie Lieggi
Shun Kashiwa	UC Santa Cruz	Translating Popper / Drone Workflows	popper	Final Report Lightning Talk	Jayjeet Chakraborty, Carlos Maltzahn
Eshan Bhargava	UC Santa Cruz	Ability to Push back query execution to Client in case of overload OSDs	skyhookdm	Final Report Lightning Talk	Jianshen Liu

 

OSRE 2020

In the summer of 2020, CROSS mentors supported 11 OSRE Summer Contributors:

Student	School	Project name	CROSS Project	Products	Mentors
Yotam Golan	UC Santa Cruz	Building a synthetic inconsistent database generator for CAvSAT	CAvSAT	Lightning Talk	Akhil Dixit
Max Tiao	UC Santa Cruz	LiveHD - LNAST Check Pass	LiveHD	Lightning Talk	Jose Renau, Sheng-hong Want
Nicole Castillo	University of Sonora	Reproducible Machine Learning Popper Workflows	Popper	Lightning Talk	Ivo Jimenez
Fernanda Dominguez	University of Sonora	Reproducible SPDK, Seastar Popper Workflows	Popper	Lightning Talk	Ivo Jimenez
Edidiong Etuk	University of Uyo (Nigeria)	Add support for Podman Engine in Popper	Popper	Lightning Talk	Ivo Jimenez
Anders Poirel	UCSC	Computational Science Reproducibility Guide & Associated Popper Workflows	Popper	Lightning Talk	Ivo Jimenez
Jayjeet Chakraborty	NIT Durgapur (India)	SkyhookDM Large-scale Reproducibility Study Using Popper	SkyhookDM	Lightning Talk	Jeff LeFevre, Ivo Jimenez
Aditi Gupta	NIT Karnataka (India)	Extend Skyhook with in-object aggregations, statistics, & table compaction for Arrow tables	SkyhookDM	Lightning Talk	Jeff LeFevre
Xiongfeng Song	Rice University	Columnar op processing & Apache Arrow Dataset integration into Skyhook objects	SkyhookDM	Lightning Talk	Jeff LeFevre
Matthew Rhea	UC Santa Cruz	Python SQL client interface	SkyhookDM	Lightning Talk	Jeff LeFevre
Nathaniel Tjandra	UC Santa Cruz	Row, column, and date-based data partitioners for Arrow tables	SkyhookDM	Lightning Talk	Jeff LeFevre

 

Launch of 2021 OSRE program

 

 

 Information for interested Participants

• Information for Undergraduates Students Interest in Applying
• Summer Research Experience Application
• Information for Interested Mentors
• Information for Program Sponsors (update available November 2021)

 

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Information for Undergraduate Students Interested in Applying

Why should I apply?

• The summer project is aimed to increase a student’s real-world coding and developer skills. Selected students benefit from direct mentorship to guide their work and improve their technical abilities. 

 

What skills do I need to apply?

• Each project idea has listed required skills needed for to contribute. If you see a project you are interested in, reach out to the mentors for specific questions about what capabilities you will need. 

 

How do I apply?

• Look at the List of Project Ideas.
• Contact the relevant mentor and discuss the project and timeline to assure it is right for you. Complete the summer research experience application for students (see below) explaining your work plan for the summer. 
• Send the final applications to the project mentor and cross-info@ucsc.edu by the deadline.

 

What are the application deadlines?

• Applications deadlines will be posted towards the end of Winter quarter. The deadline for Summer 2022 OSRE slots will be end of April (exact date TBC).

 

What is the duration of the program?

• Student summer experience runs for 10 to 12 weeks over the course of the summer. 

 

Does my project have to be open source?

• Yes. All work under this program must be open sourced upon completion. 

  Note: All software created as part of a CROSS project must be released as free and open source under a license that is both approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recognized as free by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). 

 

Do I have to be on-campus to do this program?

• No. This program is expected to be done remotely. There is no requirement for students to come to campus. 

 

Is this program open to non-UC Santa Cruz students?

• Yes. Any student over 18 can apply. This includes community college students. For students at non-U.S. universities, please reach out to CROSS (cross-info@ucsc.edu) to discuss your eligibility.

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Summer Research Experience Application 

CROSS teaches students how to productively engage in open source communities, funds high-impact research with potential of creating successful open source projects, and incubates developer communities around research prototypes. As part of this, CROSS supports a number of research and incubator fellows and their open source projects on a varying range of topics at the UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering. If you don't see a specific topic or activity listed on our ideas page feel free to suggest your own idea. Check out our research and incubator lists for our on-going projects.

Our ideas page also gives the contact information for our mentors. Students are expected to reach out to these mentors early on in the proposals stage and should have had some interaction with them prior to finalizing their proposals. Please follow the template below to apply for the CROSS Summer Research Program.  If you have questions please feel free to reach out to your mentor or CROSS staff (cross-info@ucsc.edu).

 

Proposal Template

Introduction

• Proposal Title

• Define the problem you are trying to solve

• Provide background about the current state of the problem and describe your solution

Project goals

• Project objectives and expected deliverables

Implementation Plan

• Project methodology (How will you work to meet your goals?)

• Describe the project's technical elements

Project Timeline

• Project plan and deliverables schedule 

Biographical information

• Contact information: full name, email address, current academic affiliation 

  • Optional: Blog URL, github or twitter accounts; any additional contact information you think we need.

• Relevant experience / previous work

• Relevant education background; list relevant coursework if applicable.

• Programming/development interests and strengths

 

Note to all applicants:

• Seek out mentors and other relevant contributors to learn more about the communities you want to work in. You are encouraged to ask questions and mentors are here to help you improve your application.

 

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INFORMATION FOR INTERESTED MENTORS

Why should I be a mentor?

• If you could use undergraduate research assistance over the summer with your on-going research, this is a great opportunity to get matched to tops students.

• You get to decide which student projects sound interesting to you and who you want to work with.
  

 

Who can be a mentor?

• UC affiliated faculty, researchers or graduate students working on projects that are or will ultimately be part of an open source community.
  

 

Do the projects we want help with need to be open source?

• Yes. All projects funded by CROSS or facilitated through this program must be open source projects.

Note: All software created as part of a CROSS project must be released as free and open source under a license that is both approved by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recognized as free by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

What kind of projects are you accepting? Are their specific technologies or topics that you prefer?

• CROSS is interested in supporting a wide range of open source communities within the UC system. We have no requirement for the type of technology being worked on so long as it is or ultimately will be part of an open source project or community.