GSoC 2018

GSoC 2018: CoCalc Project Ideas

CoCalc is an online web-service. It serves various open-source software applications for mathematical and scientific computing in managed projects, provides documents with real-time collaboration support (SageMath, Jupyter, LaTeX, Markdown, ...), course management utilities, chat, and much more.

Make an account here and check it out!

All GSoC projects require knowledge about modern web-technologies and its underlying technological stack.

In particular, the CoCalc is comprised of:

• backend: Linux, Node.js, Python 3, PostgreSQL
• frontend: HTML/CSS, CoffeeScript, React.js, a bit of jQuery, ...
• userland: Scientific Python stack, SageMath, Jupyter, R, hundreds of libraries, ...

Do these buzzwords sound familiar, are you excited to work this summer with us on a project, that will have immediate impact on all our users? We hope so!

Our source code: https://github.com/sagemathinc/cocalc

Below are our project ideas. Combined with the template, they should guide you in writing your application. We are equally happy with a well thought through idea of your own or a detailed write up of one of these projects.

Contact us or Harald while writing the application, such that we can assist you.

For more ideas: check out our open tickets.

Data Editor

Scientific work is increasingly data-centric. So far, CoCalc only supports text documents and interactive worksheets. The goal of this project is to help scientists at their daily work for entering data, modify existing data tables, and cleaning up datasets.

• The basic structure is to write an interactive real-time synchronized editor for typed columnar data.
• This should be based on top of the already existing infrastructure of the CoCalc webapp.
• Regrading storage, as a first approximation a file-based approach is sufficient, e.g. CSV, HDF5 or SQLITE.
• Once a minimal working prototype is functional, extend this by UI elements to filter, aggregate data, show plots of the data, convert it, annotate entries (rows), etc.

difficulty: medium

skills: python (scientific stack), coffeescript, react.js

Interactive Computing Extensions

CoCalc has it's own Jupyter Notebook implementation based on React.js. The goal of this summer project is to add small extensions to it.

• Variable inspection: introspect the current value of a variable, see which ones are currently set in the kernel, list their types and a compact representation of their value, etc.
• Improve interactive help
• Feedback for errors, such that there are clues about what to do with certain exceptions
• Widget supprt
• Presentation mode (change the front-end to render content suitable for a presentation, still with interactive cells, etc.)
• Support exercises for students, with grading, etc.
• Your ideas – come up with ideas of your own, like filtering cells based on a search string ...