GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2011

SETI Institute

Web Page: http://setiquest.org/wiki/index.php/GSoC

Mailing List: http://setiquest.org/forum

The mission of the SETI Institute is to explore, understand and explain the origin, nature and prevalence of life in the universe. The open source project is called setiQuest, and came out of Jill Tarter's 2009 TED prize wish "I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company." It is this broad participation we are seeking, both from software engineers and others.

Projects

  • Improving the setiQuest Source Code Infrastructure SonATA (SETI on the ATA) is a signal processing software system that controls the operation of the Allen Telescope Array, collects data, and performs signal analysis. This project involves making changes in SonATA source code and build infrastructure to have ease of building and running the SonATA and thus, enabling the new users to contribute to it.
  • Open sourcing of Exploratory Techniques for the SETI Search Scientists at SETI have their own suite of algorithms to analyse the ATA observation data - however, it is necessary to open this up and port it from a bunch of Matlab/Octave scripts to a unified code standard like C, also improving the code in the process. This new toolkit would be released to the entire web community, permitting users to perform their own analyses and improve the code. They may even submit their own algorithms for incorporation into the toolkit.