When we published the annual list of schools with the largest number of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2012, we received an email pointing out that we were missing one school that belongs in the Top 10. PESIT - Peoples Education Society is now shown below in the corrected chart.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students	# in 2011
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	29	27
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	21	23
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore	21	11
3	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	17	8
4	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	16	9
5	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	14	1
6	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	13	6
7	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	12	9
7	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	12	10
8	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	10	13
8	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	10	14
8	University of Ljubljana	Slovenia	10	7
9	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi	India	9	6
9	Chernihiv State Technological University	Ukraine	9	6
10 10	PESIT - Peoples Education Society UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas	India Brazil	8 8	3 14

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

Today is the first day of coding for our 8th year of the Google Summer of Code program. This year 1,208 students will spend the next 12 weeks writing code for 180 different open source organizations. Students are working on a diverse group of projects ranging from developing game systems to Spotify integration for existing tools to modules for group theory.

We are excited to see the contributions this year’s students will make to the open source community.

For more information on important dates for the program please visit our timeline.

Have a great summer!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

And now the news that some of you have been waiting for: the annual list of schools with the largest number of accepted students for Google Summer of Code 2012!

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students	# in 2011
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	29	27
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	21	23
2	National University of Singapore	Singapore	21	11
3	Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology	India	17	8
4	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	16	9
5	Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	14	1
6	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	13	6
7	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	12	9
7	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	12	10
8	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	10	13
8	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	10	14
8	University of Ljubljana	Slovenia	10	7
9	Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi	India	9	6
9	Chernihiv State Technological University	Ukraine	9	6
10	UNICAMP - Universidade Estadual de Campinas	Brazil	8	14

As you can see, some schools have a big jump in participants over 2011 - yes, I’m talking about you, BITS-Pilani - while a few schools show a drop off in students.  To compare, let’s look at the overall “Top 10” schools for the past 8 years.

Rank	School	Country	# of Accepted Students: 2005-2012
1	University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	164
2	Polytechnic University Of Bucharest	Romania	75
3	National University of Singapore	Singapore	58
3	Technische Universität Wien, (TU Wien)	Austria	58
3	Universidade Estadual de Campinas - UNICAMP	Brazil	58
4	University of Toronto	Canada	57
5	Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	51
6	Technical University Of Gdansk	Poland	49
7	Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences	China	48
8	International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	42
8	Politechnika Wroclawska	Poland	42
9	University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign	United States	41
10	Institute of Technology, Banaras Hindu University (IT-BHU)	India	38

Charts like these highlight how international Google Summer of Code truly is.  

It’s important to remember that the number of students from each school is not the point of the program. Over 13% of accepted students are from schools whose students are participating for the first time this year. What matters is participation - getting more students involved with creating free and open source software. 

By Cat Allman, Google Open Source Programs

Congratulations to everyone who was accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012! I hope we have a great summer, and write some free, clean, reusable code.

Free Software Macedonia is a local organization from Macedonia that again helped spread the word about this year’s Google Summer of Code. Last year I was introduced to free software and eventually participated in the program after reading a blog post by one of the Free Software Macedonia members. The right information and the right timing can do wonders, especially for students that are enthusiastic about doing new things and getting some practical coding experience. Three students from Macedonia participated in last year’s Google Summer of Code, including me. This number and all the others I will present may seem small to you, but Macedonia is a very small country with approximately 2,000,000 citizens.

This year we wrote blog posts, organized a lecture at the biggest technical university in the country and filled the amphitheater, and held follow up sessions to introduce possible future participants in Google Summer of Code with the tools that are used by free software communities and share some knowledge with them. We also provided support for anyone who needed it along the way as well as a space for the students to work.

At the lecture at the university, the three students that participated last year all shared their experiences as well as tips and tricks for picking an organization and writing proposals. One of the senior members of Free Software Macedonia explained the concept of free software to those audience members who were unfamiliar with the term.

We have a hackerspace in Skopje, Macedonia called KIKA that we fund and manage ourselves, and it plays a big role in promoting these kind of programs. We had 20 students attend the follow up session where we showed the prospective students the basic tools needed to be successful in free software development such as mailing lists, bug tracking software, coding concepts, git etc. We installed Linux on the many machines and discussed projects with the students. KIKA is also a public space so it was open for students to come and work there during the application period and throughout the summer. The older and more experienced members are always a great support and can help the struggling coder to see the code from a different angle and eventually achieve success.

In the end, ten people from our sessions ended up applying for Google Summer of Code, and six, all of whom worked together to achieve this at KIKA, got in. You can see their smiling faces at the moment the emails arrived on the image (I am missing from the photo).

So, from just three people last year, we doubled that number this year and we hope to double our student participation again next year. We will continue spreading the word about the program, giving support to interested students and a place for the students to work. Many thanks to Google for giving us this great chance, and helping free software. I wish you a successful summer!

Editor’s note:  There was an additional student from Macedonia who was also accepted into the program making the total number of Macedonian Google Summer of Code students for 2012 seven.

By Tamara Atanasoska, 2011 and 2012 Google Summer of Code student 

With May comes the annual ramp up of conference season, and Googlers who are part of the open source community will be giving talks and participating in events around the world over the next two months.

Last week, Jeremy Allison attended Samba XP, the 11th international Samba conference for users and developers in Göttingen, Germany speaking on "The Evolution of IO in Samba".

Our Chicago Google office will host past and present Google Summer of Code students and mentors along with students from DePaul, IIT, Northwestern, UChicago, and UIC Universities on May 23rd (Wednesday) for an evening of lightning talks delivered by accepted Google Summer of Code students and Google engineers. You can find all the details here, including how to register (pre-registration is required).

Chris DiBona will be speaking to the Open Cyber Security Roundtable in Menlo Park on May 30. The roundtable is part of a larger program to get more open source tools and apps into the security arsenal of federal, state and local government.

On June 12th, Cat Allman will be facilitating a session at the inaugural USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) Summit. WiAC will take place as part of USENIX Federated Conferences Week (FCW) in Boston, MA.

Attendees and viewers of Google I/O coming June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco will hear about a variety of Google’s open source projects, stay tuned to https://developers.google.com/events/io/ for more information on sessions. There will also be a dinner for GSoC Mentors hosted by Carol Smith in late June.

We hope to see you at one of these spring events!

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

So many of you have asked about the number of students from your particular country that we’ve decided to simply post the whole list.

Number of Accepted Students by Country

India = 227

United States = 173

Germany = 72

Russian Federation = 56

China = 45

Poland = 42

Sri Lanka = 42

Romania = 40

France = 38

Canada = 36

Brazil = 33

United Kingdom = 31

Italy = 30

Austria = 25

Ukraine = 25

Spain = 23

Singapore = 20

Greece = 18

Czech Republic = 15

Turkey = 15

Hungary = 14

Sweden = 14

Slovenia = 11

Belgium = 9

Croatia = 8

Finland = 8

Australia = 7

Belarus = 7

Ireland = 7

Macedonia = 7

Netherlands = 7

Switzerland = 7

Vietnam = 7

Slovak Republic = 6

Bulgaria = 5

Japan = 5

Serbia = 5

Argentina = 4

Egypt = 4

Latvia = 4

Lithuania = 4

Pakistan = 4

Portugal = 4

Bangladesh = 3

Chile = 3

Ecuador = 3

Israel = 3

Moldova = 3

Norway = 3

Peru = 3

South Korea = 3

Colombia = 2

Estonia = 2

Indonesia = 2

Taiwan = 2

Algeria = 1

Bosnia-Herzegovina = 1

Denmark = 1

Hong Kong = 1

Mauritius = 1

Mexico = 1

Nepal = 1

New Zealand = 1

Saudi Arabia = 1

South Africa = 1

Uruguay = 1

Uzbekistan = 1

Venezuela = 1

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Now that the mentoring organizations have made their selections, it’s time for the first of two posts breaking down the numbers about the students accepted into the 2012 instance of Google Summer of Code.

This 8th year of Google Summer of Code is the largest yet. More mentoring organizations received more applications from more students than ever before. We received a record number of applications - 6685 - from 4258 students from 98 countries to work with the 180 selected mentoring organizations.

We also accepted more students this year: 1212 from 69 countries. This year India supplied the largest number of students, 227.

The 10 countries with the highest number of accepted students are:

Country	# of 2012 Accepted Students
India	227
United States	172
Germany	72
Russian Federation	56
China	45
Poland	42
Sri Lanka	42
Romania	40
France	38
Canada	36

This year we are excited to have a student from the African nation of Mauritius, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mauritius) which hasn’t previously been represented in Google Summer of Code.

The program set another record this year: the highest percentage yet of women accepted. 8.3% of our accepted students identified themselves as female, versus 7.1% percent last year. Overall the percentage of women accepted has slowly but surely increased every year since 2006.

We’re very excited to see what our record crop of students come up with this year! Currently the students are in the community bonding period where they familiarize themselves with their projects, mentors and communities, before the coding period starts on Monday, May 21st.  Good luck to them all!

Please visit our program site and timeline for more information, and watch this space for part 2 of “Google Summer of Code 2012 by the Numbers” about the universities represented this year.

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Solving non-linear least squares problems comes up in a broad range of areas across science and engineering - from fitting complicated curves in statistics, to constructing 3D models from photographs in computer vision. Today we're happy to announce the release of a solver we use at Google.

Ceres Solver is a portable C++ library that allows for modeling and solving large complex nonlinear least squares problems. The notable features are:
• A simple, expressive API
• Automatic differentiation
• Robust loss functions
• Local parameterizations
• A threaded Jacobian evaluators and linear solvers
• Dense QR factorization (using Eigen) for small problems
• Sparse Cholesky factorization (using SuiteSparse) for large sparse problems
• Specialized solvers for problems in 3D computer vision
• A liberal license (New BSD)
• Scales from servers to cell phones.

We use Ceres Solver at Google to estimate the pose of Street View cars, aircrafts, and satellites; to build 3D models for PhotoTours; to estimate satellite image sensor characteristics, and more. For example, the video below shows three instances of Ceres Solver fusing data from the sensors mounted on a Street View car to estimate its correct position and orientation on the surface of earth.



We hope you will download the code, solve some problems, and share your experiences on the mailing list.

By Sameer Agarwal & Keir Mierle, Geo Software Engineers

The Git version control system plays a big part in the development of the Linux kernel and its related utilities. Developers around the world need fast access to the repositories hosted by git.kernel.org.

Today Google is making available a public mirror of git.kernel.org at https://kernel.googlesource.com/. This mirror service is backed by the same high speed infrastructure that hosts the Android Open Source Project, which already serves more than 1 terabyte of data and 2.5 million requests each day.

kernel.googlesource.com is served out of multiple Google data centers, utilizing facilities in Asia, the United States and Europe to provide speedy access from almost anywhere in the world.

By Shawn Pearce, Open Source Programs Office

We have announced the 1,212 students that will be participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. Students will now start the community bonding period where they will get to know their mentors and prepare for the program by reading documentation, hanging out in the IRC channel (#gsoc) and familiarizing themselves with their new community before beginning their actual coding at the end of May.

If you are interested in learning more about the 180 organizations that the students will be working with during the 2012 Google Summer of Code or important dates, please visit the program website.

Congratulations to our accepted students! We look forward to an exciting and productive summer of coding.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Programs Office