VTK’s Second Google Summer of Code

This year was VTK‘s second year as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organization, and we had a tough time narrowing it down to three student projects! You can see a write up of our first summer of code here, and we are extremely pleased to be a part of the tenth year for the program. I first took part in it as a student in 2007, and I have acted as a student and mentor for KDE. These last few years, I have taken part as VTK’s organizational administrator, as well as mentoring a project in our first year.

Brad Eric Hollister worked on the “Esemble Vector Fields for VTK” project, mentored by Berk Geveci. His project uses the newly added vtkEnsembleSource class to manage a collection of data sources to represent a dataset ensemble. Testing of the approach was largely conducted in a commodity three node PC cluster.

Marco Cecchetti worked on the “Supporting a Visualization Grammar” project, mentored by Jeff Baumes. His project aimed to provide the ability to create plots and charts in VTK using a simple declarative language based on the Vega project developed by Jeffrey Heer. This project involved extending the 2D rendering capabilities in VTK and developing a parser to turn the JSON specification into a set of graphical objects that can be rendered in the VTK framework.

Jatin Parekh worked on the “Extensions for Geospatial and Climate Based Visualizations in VTK” project, mentored by Aashish Chaudhary. His project extended the geospatial and climate data visualization capabilities in VTK, adding new readers for GeoJSON and LAS. His project also looked at the use of tile-rendering from the Bing Maps and OpenStreetMap tile services.

We are very pleased to announce that all of our students passed and developed some great additions to the VTK project. We will have a more detailed write up in the next edition of the Kitware Source and look forward to taking part in the GSoC Mentor Summit/Reunion in October. This is a great program that helps us to introduce students to a large open-source project, as well as open science! We hope our students have enjoyed their GSoC projects and look forward to seeing what they go on to do in future years!