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
- Everware. The everware project is making data analysis easier to reuse and reproduce. Everware allows users to launch Jupyter Notebooks in a docker container. All you need is a compatible git repository to get started.
- Try the working demo with one of these compatible repositories
- GitHub: https://github.com/everware
- Gitter: https://gitter.im/everware/everware
- Winner: Best Technology
- YA3C : Yet Another 3D Controller. Interact with 3D models using your cell phone as a controller. A web based solution using your existing devices to control the screen.
- GitHub: https://github.com/spMohanty/YA3C
- Special Mention
- CommuniCode. A git-based coding social network with an easy to use interface. The version control visualizations encourage newcomers and learning around open source.
Crowdsourcing
- Open Cosmics: cosmic-ray physics for everyone. Open Cosmics connects a distributed network of devices capturing high-energy cosmic events. The public dataset is then crowdsourced for analysis.
- Read about their experience at webfest and collaboration with CosmicPi here.
- GitHub: webapp, backend & data analysis
- Winner: Best Innovative Outreach
Educational games
- Universe maker. A game where the player is steering a particle after the Big Bang. Your goal is to grow in size and make a universe!
- Demo: Play it here!
- Winnter: Best Educational
- Snaky particles. A snake-style educational particle physics game.
- Demo: Play it here!
- GitHub: https://github.com/snaky-particles/snaky-particles
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
- W6-Assess. News based security profiling. A platform automating the collection of statistics on violence from articles. W6-Assess uses natural language processing to extract information followed by crowdsourced confirmation.
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.
- Read more about the Open Research Accelerator: http://beta.briefideas.org/open-research-accelerator
- Ready to apply? Submit your idea here.
Header image: the Snaky Particles team working through the night. Image by Lioumpa Theodoridou.