Open Source Research Experience

Information on OSRE 2022 is now available

Inspired by Google Summer of Code, CROSS launched the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) in the summer of 2020, a marketplace for open source project ideas that matches students to mentors, and engages members of industry to fund and participate in open source based summer internships. The goal of this program is to increase student capabilities in working in open source, add productive contributors to on-going projects, and further promote open source at UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses. OSRE rounds out the mission of CROSS to educate students by supporting their contribution to developer communities in open source projects and providing highly relevant open source experiences to undergrads.

The benefits for industry partners and other interested sponsors include the identification of potential recruits, the encouragement of open source practices in academic research, and early access to technologies in research prototypes.

The benefits for participating mentors include the opportunity to attract and support talented student developers to their open source community.

The benefits for participating students include the opportunity to work with mentors who are genuinely interested in outcomes and exposure to technologies that can significantly improve their job opportunities.

 

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 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?

 

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.


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.

 


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.