Summer of Code/2009/Multimedia-broadcasting
Please apply also in melange, google's web app; if you do not apply there before April 3, we will not be able to accept your application.
Please keep an eye on your talk page (the "discussion" link above). If you hit "watch" above, you can set up your "prefs" to email you the first time it changes since you last saw it.
About you
Q: What is your name?
A: Geza Kovacs
Q: What is your email address?
A: gkovacs -at- mit -dot- edu
Q: What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?
A: gkovacs
Q: What is your IRC nickname?
A: gkovacs
Q: What is your primary language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)
A: English
Q: Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)
A: USA, either Pacific or Eastern time zones. I tend to work anytime between 8AM to midnight.
Q: Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?
A: My two most successful open-source projects to date (with over 2 million downloads apiece) are Wubi and UNetbootin, both of which I launched during my high school years. I have also worked on some other minor projects for which I have open-sourced code, most of which can be found around my launchpad page if they are of particular interest; however the major projects I am currently working on as part of undergraduate research (mostly related to audio and video analysis in the context of emotion recognition based on facial and speech features) are unfortunately currently proprietary (but we expect to open-source it in May).
http://wubi-installer.org/ Designed, initially led development of, and created the prototypes and early versions of the Windows-based Ubuntu Installer, now part of Ubuntu 8.04, which allows Windows users to safely install Ubuntu Linux without repartitioning their hard drives.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ Creator, Lead Developer, and Maintainer of UNetbootin, a cross-platform utility to perform network installations or create bootable USB flash drives for a wide variety of Linux distributions.
Further details about of my FOSS development activities (code repository, bug reports, specs) can be found on http://launchpad.net/~gezakovacs
About your project
Q: What is the name of your project?
A: A Framework for multimedia-rich conferencing with autodiscovered peers on the local network
Q: Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?
A: This project aims to create an Activity to allow users to easily broadcast and stream audio and video from their webcam and microphone or their computer's display output to a classroom's central server, and share the live feed with their peers. This will be integrated into the Neighborhood View (as a "broadcast audio and video to" option or similar) to allow for most seamless sharing of broadcasts.
Rationale: This project does not aim to recreate Skype or similar central-server small-scale conferencing software. This project's local-peer-discovery and mass-broadcasting architecture would be of use in a classroom setting for the following reasons:
As we have seen in classroom settings such as MIT's TEAL project (for teaching introductory Physics), in the context of displaying live information from a to a large group of students for an experiment, lecture, or the like, a video feed must be established and broadcast, ideally via several video displays. In TEAL, many projectors placed throughout the classroom are used for this purpose; however for an elementary school this would be prohibitively expensive. Assuming said elementary school is running a pilot program of Sugar-equipped laptops, they can instead have each student's laptop "listen" to incoming audio and video broadcasts, and display it when received. This also has the advantage of
Security Architecture
There is an obvious security risk of unsolicited streams appearing on students' laptops, especially if the broadcasting occurs from an online source.
Video Sources
Webcam X11 desktop output Icecast will be used for streaming video sources to the laptop.
Video Interaction
There should be some equivalent of a "pointer" on the video, for highlighting important information
Potential Enhancements
These enhancements are probably beyond the scope of a single GSoC project. However, since this architecture has the potential to replace the standard projector-based lecture presentation mechanism, perhaps other, non-video formats, namely PDF lecture slides, might be supported as a future enhancement as well.
Programming Languages: Since sugar-chat-activity uses Python, I will likely be using it for this project as well. The Telepathy and Farsight2 libraries will be used for implementing the multimedia chat feature.
Q: What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is 7 weeks long, May 23 - August 10; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (July 6-13); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.
A: Week 1: Week 2: Week 3: Week 4: Week 5: Week 6: Week 7:
Q: Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.
You and the community
- If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.
- Sugar Labs will be working to set up a small (5-30 unit) Sugar pilot near each student project that is accepted to GSoC so that you can immediately see how your work affects children in a deployment. We will make arrangements to either supply or find all the equipment needed. Do you have any ideas on where you would like your deployment to be, who you would like to be involved, and how we can help you and the community in your area begin it?
- What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?
- How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project?
Miscellaneous
- We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts. Please send us a link to a screenshot of your Sugar development environment with the following modification: when you hover over the XO-person icon in the middle of Home view, the drop-down text should have your email in place of "Restart." See the image on the right for an example. It's normal to need assistance with this, so please visit our IRC channel, #sugar on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.
- What is your t-shirt size? (Yes, we know Google asks for this already; humor us.)
- Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.
- Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more?
Note: you will post this application on the wiki in the category Category:2009 GSoC applications. We encourage you to browse this category and comment on the talk page of other applications. Also, others' comments and your responses on the talk page of your own application are viewed favorably, and, while we don't like repetitive spam, we welcome honest questions and discussion of your project idea on the mailing list(s) (primarily sugar-devel for technical issues and It's An Education Project for educational issues) and/or IRC.
The NeL project has some good general recommendations for writing proposals. We endorse them all; although Sugar is (regrettably) not test driven development (yet - your project could change that!), we encourage GSoC code to include tests.