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| Chiu |
VANCOUVER, Wash. Travis Hall, a computer science graduate student at Washington State Vancouver, has been selected to participate in the competitive Google Summer of Code program. David Chiu, assistant professor of computer science, was selected as a mentor.
Two computer science undergraduate students also were selected. A total of 1,116 applicants were accepted out of 5,474 proposals from around the world.
The global program offers students a $5,000 stipend to write computer code for open-source projects.
“Google Summer of Code will strengthen our student’s work ethic, independence, humility and character,” Chiu said. “As an international and highly selective program, the acceptance of our students is representative of the strength of the computer science program and the WSU Vancouver School of Engineering and Computer Science.”
The program works with open-source, free-software or technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three-month period. Participating open source organizations include Drupal, WordPress, Mozilla and Moodle.
Since its inception in 2005, the program has teamed up more than 4,500 students with 4,000 mentors from 85 countries.
Students gain exposure to real-world software development scenarios and opportunities for employment. In turn, open source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.
Hall’s proposal is titled “Git in the Classroom” and is a reference to the Git source code management tool. The Web software will provide repositories for students to store and submit their programming projects.
“Google Summer of Code is a great opportunity to meet new people from around the world, work on a large-scale web app and get my name in the industry,” said Hall.
While Google is compensating students to work on open-source projects, it does not actually own them. Chiu sees this as Google’s way to give back to the community.
“Because open-source contributors are not normally paid, maintaining and improving these softwares can be hard due to lack of resources,” he said. “Google’s involvement is in supporting the open-source spirit, spurring interest in the community and offering resources toward advancing some of the most promising projects.”
Google is a multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing and advertising technologies. The company runs more than 1 million servers in data centers around the world and processes more than 1 billion search requests every day.
Google offers online productivity software such as its Gmail email service, social networking tool Google Buzz, Web browser Google Chrome, instant messaging application Google Talk and many others.