Earlham Institute partners with Google for next generation of coders

The Earlham Institute's (EI’s) leading open-source project for visualisation of biological data BioJS takes part as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2016 (GSoC) programme.

 

Co-led by EI, BioJS is a growing international community of around 80 software developers and life scientists from across the globe, which has contributed to a useful tool that enables visualisation of biological data to decode living systems and help tackle some of the major challenges we face in modern society.

The BioJS repository of data visualisation components boasts over 150 JavaScript-based tools tailored to the specific needs of biologists, bioinformaticians and web developers in the analysis and presentation of their biological data.

As one of the selected 178 organisations from different areas of software and web development, BioJS is mentoring five ambitious students in projects involving and further developing BioJS components and resources in this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

In the three-month coding placement, students are focusing on their proposed project from their GSoC application under the guidance of experienced developers from the BioJS community. From developing a medical imaging app where you can keep a record of your medical scans and interact with these through a webcam; integrating human protein data for research into human expression; to visualising results from a drug target identification service, the student projects will apply to different bioinformatics and web development-related issues.

The final projects will be reviewed by their mentors and successfully completed projects officially announced by Google at the end of August.

With this mentoring opportunity, BioJS hopes to engage the participating students not only in working on real open-source projects in general, but also involve them in the project's innovative community.

GSoC is a global programme that encourages university students into coding and open source software development. Students who successfully complete their coding project will receive a stipend of $5,500 from Google under the umbrella of their associated mentoring organisation.

Earlham Project lead Manuel Corpas, said: “Google’s Summer of Code programme continues to recognise the international value of BioJS as an open source community for developers worldwide.”

“GSoC is more than just your usual summer coding project – it connects the BioJS project with the young and upcoming developer community out there which is refreshing!” added Jessica Jordan, both web developer and GSoC mentoring organisation administrator for BioJS at EI.

Image: coding

Credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Code.jpg

 

About Earlham Institute
The Earlham Institute (EI) is a world-leading research institute focusing on the development of genomics and computational biology. EI is based within the Norwich Research Park and is one of eight institutes that receive strategic funding from Biotechnology and Biological Science Research Council (BBSRC) - £6.45M in 2015/2016 - as well as support from other research funders. EI operates a National Capability to promote the application of genomics and bioinformatics to advance bioscience research and innovation.

EI offers a state of the art DNA sequencing facility, unique by its operation of multiple complementary technologies for data generation. The Institute is a UK hub for innovative bioinformatics through research, analysis and interpretation of multiple, complex data sets. It hosts one of the largest computing hardware facilities dedicated to life science research in Europe. It is also actively involved in developing novel platforms to provide access to computational tools and processing capacity for multiple academic and industrial users and promoting applications of computational Bioscience. Additionally, the Institute offers a training programme through courses and workshops, and an outreach programme targeting key stakeholders, and wider public audiences through dialogue and science communication activities. www.earlham.ac.uk

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For further information, please contact:
Hayley London
Marketing & Communications Officer, Earlham Institute
T: +44 (0)1603 450107
E: Hayley.London@earlham.ac.uk

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