CERN Summer Student Webfest

Earlier this month I had the privilege to judge #cernwebfest, the annual hackathon for CERN summer students and staff. Over the weekend, teams formed to work on projects related to physics, health or humanitarian research using open web technologies.

This event attracts high quality and diverse talent found in the competitive summer student program, CERN staff and invited mentors. These creative minds are offered a variety of workshops and challenged to use the open web to build a research relevant prototype. This format encourages leveraging existing web technologies and other best practices in open source. The projects coming out of CERN Webfest are some of the most innovative and needed uses of the web in research.

This post will highlight a few of my favourite projects. The ‘Best Overall’ winner will be at the Mozilla Festival (MozFest) Nov 6-8 in London this year. All projects are open source and welcome new contributions.

Technology

Crowdsourcing

Educational games

Volunteer computing

  • KC + CERN Gigabit Computing Challenge. Kansas City (KC) was the first city in the US to get Google Fiber. KC residents are invited to donate processor power to help analyze and simulate particle collisions. With gigabit fiber, volunteers can perform computations that were impossible before.

Winner – Best Overall

There were many more excellent prototypes I couldn’t list! You can read more about the projects and winners here. Many thanks to the event organziers, Francois Grey and Ben Segal, for a successful event. And thank you to my fellow judges Bilge Demirkoz and Claudia Marcelloni De Oliveira.

Join us at MozFest

Interested in the work done at CERN Webfest? Join us at MozFest to help continue the momentum around some of these projects.

You can also bring your own open source scientific project to MozFest! We’re running the Open Research Accelerator to focus on practical training and hands-on experience building collaboratively in open source.

 

Header image: the Snaky Particles team working through the night. Image by Lioumpa Theodoridou.