News | UCSC OSPO

The First Annual UC Open Highlights Open Source Innovation in the UC System

Wed, 28 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The University of California Open Summit (UC Open) 2025 was held on April 23–24 at the UCSC Silicon Valley Campus in Santa Clara. This was the first major event organized by the University of California Open Source Program Office (UC OSPO) Network. The summit – which welcomed about 125 participants – provided a unique opportunity to illustrate the value of open source within the UC system and its broader impact on the wider open source community. The UC Open Source Summit included keynotes, panels, directed discussions and technical sessions that covered a wide range of topics and brought together UC researchers, faculty, students and staff, as well as industry and open source communities interested in collaborating in open source. By bringing together a diverse community of contributors, the summit fostered meaningful discussions, collaborations, and a shared vision for the future of open source within the University of California system and beyond. This inaugural event further revealed an energetic, ambitious vision shared among researchers, staff, and industry professionals that greater university engagement with, and support for, open source projects can be a cornerstone of expanded innovation.

Highlights from Day One included:

Academic Contributions to Open Source: A panel moderated by Stephanie Lieggi (UC Santa Cruz) highlighted the diverse journeys of open source professionals, each shaped by a combination of support, serendipity, and vision, with insights from panelists Fernando Perez (UC Berkeley and Jupyter), Bin Fan (Alluxio), and Tony Wasserman (Software Methods & Tools, formerly of CMU and UC San Francisco).
Commercial Open Source Models: A fireside chat with Heather Meeker (Tech Law Partners LLP) and James Davis (UC Santa Cruz) delved into how innovators can profit by giving software away. Meeker believes that open source is a strength, not a weakness, for a business, expanding a product’s reach and building trust in one’s brand.
A Data-based Approach to Building Inclusive Open Source Communities: Kenyatta Forbes shared insights from GitHub’s recent Open Source Survey, which explored how academic institutions can shape the future of a more inclusive, sustainable open source ecosystem. The survey notably revealed that much progress remains to be made in improving diversity and belonging in open source. Nevertheless, Forbes pointed to several remedies that projects have implemented and that resulted in tangible improvements.
Understanding the Wicked Problem of Working in the Open: VM (Vicky) Brasseur addressed the complexities of collaboration in open source projects, highlighting common pitfalls and strategies to overcome them. In this presentation, Brasseur characterized collaboration in open source as a “wicked problem”–a term from the social sciences for a problem without a solution. Despite this, argued Brasseur, we can make progress through small steps.
Increasing Research Impact through Open Source and Technology Transfer: A panel moderated by Karla Padilla (UC San Diego), featuring panelists from various UC campuses and the UC Office of the President, discussed how tech transfer offices can support open source creators and contributors through tailored open source licenses and legal recommendations that account for the creator’s goals and principles.
Open Source in Science: Kate Hertweck from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative shared insights from CZI’s Essential Open Source Software for Science program, which has been a major supporter of open science work. In an analysis grounded in survey data, Kate shared the lessons CZI has learned about how to maximize the impact of funding for open source sustainability.

The UC Open made a conscious effort to provide space for meaningful interactions and provided participants ample opportunities to network and have in-depth conversations. To further promote that goal, the first day’s program ended with a lively round of Lightning Intros from almost 30 participants. These intros were an opportunity for anyone attending to say a quick hello ahead of the reception, catalyzing the making of connections between people who may not have had a chance to meet and share experiences.

The second day of the event emphasized practical, community-focused engagement in open source, addressing both technical and institutional challenges. Through interactive panels, technical talks, and directed discussions, attendees explored how UC can lead and innovate in the open source ecosystem, reinforcing the summit’s mission of building a sustainable and inclusive open source culture.

Highlights from Day Two included:

Understanding What is Meant by “Open”: Moderator Kirstie Whitaker (UC Berkeley) talked with UC OSPO Network members Amber Budden (UCSB), Todd Grappone (UCLA) and Jarrod Millman (UC Berkeley), as well as open science expert Kristen Ratan (Strategies for Open Science) about the definition of “open” in the context of research, science, and technology. Panelists and audience members shared diverse perspectives on openness in data sharing, software, and scientific collaboration.
Open Source in Agriculture and the overlap of academia and industry: Moderator Rob Trice (Better Food Ventures) brought together a diverse panel of experts from academia and industry to look at the growing effort to leverage open source tools and data to innovate in food production, supply chains, and sustainability. This was the first of its kind cross-sector discussion on open source and AgriFood.
Understanding Open Source Licensing and Contributions in Academic Settings: Two moderated discussion sessions focused on the impact of licensing on open source projects originating in academia and contributions to outside projects by university staff and researchers. In the first session, moderators Karla Padilla (UC San Diego) and Jeff Shapiro (Linux Foundation) led an interactive discussion that looked at the fundamentals of OSS licenses, including permissive vs. copyleft models and best practices for UC-affiliated developers. In the second, participants talked about common challenges for university staff – particularly in the IT departments – working with open source software, and looked at ways of mitigating barriers to contributing to impactful projects.
Highlighting the UC Network’s work on OSS Sustainability: This session included a directed discussion of open source sustainability and effort to improve the resilience of open source efforts at UC. It included a demo of the Open Source Software PRojEct sustainabilitY tracker (OSSPREY) developed at UC Davis.
AI, Open Source and Industry Collaboration: The Summit had two technical sessions focusing on the impact of AI on academic collaborations. One focused on the vLLM project, which is a successful collaboration between RedHat and UC Berkeley. Another session highlighted the security challenges of the ML supply chain and demonstrated how cryptographic signatures can help users verify that the models they use are exactly those produced by trusted developers.

The summit concluded with a collaborative discussion, led by UC OSPO Network Community Manager Laura Langdon, on the role of OSPOs in fostering open source across UC campuses and identifying strategies to scale their impact. In this session, participants provided valuable feedback into what they wanted to see from OSPOs on their campuses.

Sponsors and Support

UC Open 2025 was made possible through the generous support of several sponsors:

Platinum Sponsors: Red Hat, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Silver Sponsor: UCSC’s Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS)

Bronze Sponsor: GitHub

The event also received significant support from UCSC’s Baskin Engineering, which provided the venue and technical support for the entire event.

Looking to 2026!

There will be a UC Open 2026! The UC OSPO Network has tentatively agreed to hold our second summit at one of our Southern California campuses to allow for more participation from campuses, industry and open source communities in that region. Stay tuned for more details on that soon!

Accepted as 2025 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to have once again been selected as a Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. The 2025 Open Source Research Experience (and with it the 2024 Summer of Reproducibility ) will once again benefit from GSOC’s world-wide outreach and generous funding of contributors. We are now listed among 185 selected mentor organizations. See our organization page) on the GSoC 2025 site.

Since 2018, the we have successfully mentored over 50 GSoC supported contributors and look forward to working with more contributors this year! We are also excited to welcome back numerous former GSoC contributors joining us as 2025 GSoC mentors - Kiran Deol and Jack Luar.

Interested students should check out our projects for proposal ideas from our mentors. As an umbrella organization supporting many academic open source endeavors, our projects cover a wide range of topics including:

AI/ML
Reprodubibility
OS Hardware
Bioinformatics
Educational Technologies
Visualization
Storage systems
High Performance Computing

Students are encouraged to reach out to our mentors during the proposals stage. See our student information section for information related to the proposal process. Note we ask that all interested student join our Slack channel by March 23 in order for their application to be considered. Contact the OSRE admin to get the link.

OSRE 2025 Mentor Info Session

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The OSRE organizers recorded information session for mentors is now available for your review.

The OSRE is modeled after the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which matches undergraduate student contributors with mentors working on open source projects. The OSRE leverages our involvement in global programs like GSoC to recruit students from around the world. All students are paid a stipend and mentors are provided administrative and other needed support to allow for a productive summer.

The OSRE 2024 supported the work of 40 successful summer projects and we are looking to expand that number even further this year. But we need mentors to work with our amazing students. Mentors from previous years have spoken highly of their experience:

In this video, the OSRE organizers give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being a mentor. We will also highlight the changes in the 2025 program aimed at making the OSRE even more rewarding for both mentors and students.

SoR 2025 Mentor Info Session

Wed, 13 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The OSRE organizers will give a brief overview of the Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) 2025 program and discuss the benefits of being an SoR mentor at a Mentor Info Session on December 4, 2024 8:30am Pacific Time / 11:30 Eastern Time**.

The OSRE and the SoR is modeled after the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which matches undergraduate student contributors with mentors working on open source projects. One goal of the OSRE program is to help make computational research efforts reproducible with our NSF funded Summer of Reproducibility. The OSRE leverages our involvement in global programs like GSoC to recruit students from around the world. All students are paid a stipend and mentors are provided administrative and other needed support to allow for a productive summer.

The OSRE funded student … helped us create detailed docs and scripts to easily reproduce our project evaluations. This not only eases our own future work, but also helps us promote our work as other people can easily reproduce our results.

[The program] provided us a great platform to connect with great students and have them join our projects and make progress.

[The OSRE] can be very useful for the sustainability of academic open source projects. It can help identify potential contributors and kick-start the design and implementation of new features.

At the December 4th meeting, we will give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being a mentor. We will be asking a number of our mentors from previous years to join in the discussion to share their experiences. We will also highlight the changes in the 2025 program aimed at making the OSRE even more rewarding for both mentors and students.

UC Network Joins UN OSPOs For Good to Enhance Global Collaboration on Sustainability Goals

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 11:22:07 -0700

UC Network Joins UN OSPOs For Good to Enhance Global Collaboration on Sustainability Goals

From July 9-10, 2024, representatives from the six campuses working to build a network of Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) within the University of California (UC) system were part of the OSPOs For Good event at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. This major event, which brought together open source experts and leaders from industry, governments and non-governmental organizations, highlighted how OSPOs working together across multiple sectors can help build networks of collaboration.

The event was kicked off with a panel that laid out how open source and working in open environments could help the UN and other international organizations in meeting the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As noted by Astor Nummelin Carlberg, Executive Director, OpenForum Europe, the UN exists because some challenges are too complex for nations to tackle alone; similarly open source exists so that we can do more together and find ways to collaborate. Ambassador Philip Thigo, Special Envoy on Technology, Government of Kenya (co-sponsor of event) further noted in the opening session that open source shows the promise of enabling diverse communities, pointing at the vast contributions of people from the Global South to open source projects throughout the world. Full video for the event is available on the UN website:

July 9 Morning Session & Afternoon Session
July 10 Morning Session & Afternoon Session

The presence of members of the UC OSPO network was seen as a major indicator of how OSPOs working together could improve collaboration and coordination across different sectors. These discussions were particularly highlighted in the July 11 follow up meeting hosted by Apache Foundation and Linux Foundation in collaboration with organizers from OSPO++. This meeting entitled “What’s Next for Open Source: Workshops for Building Solutions with Open Innovation” helped participants from the UN sponsored conference look at ways that open source networks can enable global cooperation. That meeting included workshops and presentations from three UC OSPO network members and provided a forum for highlighting how the newly formed network could become a model for other sectors to follow. The UN event and the action focused workshops were also vital for the network and our partners to see how our activities could support the UN SDG’s and have a positive impact on the communities we call home.

UC OSPO Network Launched

Fri, 31 May 2024 11:22:07 -0700

In Spring 2024, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded a team of six UC campuses a $1.85million grant to further the on-going work of the UCSC Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at UC Santa Cruz aimed at promoting open source research, teaching, and public service in the UC system. UCSC is collaborating with partners at Berkeley, Davis, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and San Diego to institutionalize the OSPO approach in the UC system by creating coordinated activities that support local campus OSPOs and building a network that can leverage multi-campus efforts.

Full reporting on this Sloan Funding and the UC OSPO Network grant can be found in this UCSC news release)

The UCSC OSPO were excited to host the Kick-Off meeting for the network on May 31, 2024. In this meeting the network discussed governance issues and further understanding how to work together to build a UC-wide open source community. This meeting helped start the process for the UC OSPO Network to establish coordinated activities at each participating campus and provided a level of shared understanding.

40 Contributors participating in OSRE '24

Tue, 28 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Summer 2024 OSRE supporting 40 students working on Open Source and Reproductivity

Thanks to the support from the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and the National Science Foundation FAIROS RCN program, the UCSC OSPO has matched 40 students with mentors to contribute to open source and reproducibility this year. This year GSoC awarded us a record 18 slots with the Summer of Reproducibility supporting another 22 students. We are also working with other funding opportunities to support the work of additional students – so our list will be growing.

Most projects will run from late May to the end of August / early September.

Funding for these contributors is provided by the NSF REPETO Project-sponsored Summer of Reproducibility, the Google Summer of Code, and Baskin Engineering. Check out the Student Pages where contributors have begun blogging updates about their summer projects!

Accepted as 2024 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We are excited to have once again been selected as a Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. The 2024 Open Source Research Experience (and with it the 2024 Summer of Reproducibility ) will once again benefit from GSOC’s world-wide outreach and generous funding of contributors. We are now listed among 190 selected mentor organizations. See our organization page on the GSoC 2024 site.

Since 2018, the we have successfully mentored 36 GSoC supported contributors and look forward to working with more contributors this year! We are also excited to welcome back two former GSoC contributors joining us as 2024 GSoC mentors - Kiran Deol and Jack Luar.

AI/ML
Reprodubibility
OS Hardware
Bioinformatics
Educational Technologies
Visualization
Storage systems
High Performance Computing

Students are encouraged to reach out to our mentors during the proposals stage. See our student information section for information related to the proposal process. Note we ask that all interested student join our Slack channel by March 19 in order for their application to be considered. Contact the OSRE admin to get the link.

OSRE 2024 Mentor Info Session

Wed, 03 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Video of Previous Info Session now available

Could your open source project or reproducibility-related research project benefit from working with enthusiastic and talented students who are paid to productively contribute to your work this coming Summer? Would you or someone in your open source or research project be able to mentor a new contributor for no more than 5 hours per week? The Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) Program may be the opportunity you are looking for to move your research forward and build your community.

The OSRE organizers will give a brief overview of the Summer 2024 program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor at a Mentor Info Session on January 11 at 10am Pacific Time.

The OSRE is modeled after the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which matches undergraduate student contributors with mentors working on open source projects. The goal of the OSRE program is to seed contributor communities of UC-based open source research efforts through participation in parallel efforts like GSoC AND to help make computational research efforts reproducible with our NSF funded Summer of Reproducibility. The OSRE leverages our involvement in global programs like GSoC to recruit students from around the world. All students are paid a stipend and mentors are provided administrative and other needed support to allow for a productive summer.

The OSRE 2023 supported the work of 38 successful summer projects and we are looking to expand that number even further this year. But we need mentors to work with our amazing students. Mentors from previous years have spoken highly of their experience:

The OSRE funded student … helped us create detailed docs and scripts to easily reproduce our project evaluations. This not only eases our own future work, but also helps us promote our work as other people can easily reproduce our results.

[The program] provided us a great platform to connect with great students and have them join our projects and make progress.

[The OSRE] can be very useful for the sustainability of academic open source projects. It can help identify potential contributors and kick-start the design and implementation of new features.

At this meeting, we will give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor. We will be asking a number of our mentors from the OSRE 2023 program to join in the discussion to share their experiences. We will also highlight the changes in the 2024 program aimed at making the OSRE even more rewarding for both mentors and students.

I'm retiring!

Fri, 15 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

After 19 years at UC Santa Cruz I retired on December 15, 2023. The reason is entirely personal. I found my time at UC Santa Cruz extremely fulfilling, and I really enjoyed working with all of you!

I’m aware that this announcement comes rather sudden. In fact, I planned this step for a while. However as a soft money guy I won’t get funding for my group if I announce my retirement too early. So it’s a caught-a-tiger-by-the-tail kind of situation. I hope for your understanding.

I’m really happy about CROSS and the OSPO being able to continue in very capable hands: Stephanie Lieggi will continue as executive director and James Davis is succeeding me as faculty director — both are very familiar with the structure, vision, and finances of CROSS and the OSPO (James Davis has been serving on the CROSS Advisory Committee for a number of years). Also part of the leadership team will be Emily Lovell.

James fully supports the vision of the OSPO UC Santa Cruz and our effort to expand across multiple UC campuses with the “UC Network of OSPOs”. Stephanie is leading that amazing six-campus-spanning effort, including UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSB, UCSC, and UCSD. We are also seeing progress towards getting the OSPO UC Santa Cruz established as part of the Office of Research and work on having Stephanie lead it.

The new PIs and co-PIs for my ongoing grants are: Cormac Flanagan and Stephanie Lieggi for REPETO, Heiner Litz for IRIS-HEP, and Andrew Quinn for the LLNL subcontract with Todd Gamblin.

Foremost I thank my graduated Ph.D. students Sasha Ames (2011), Joe Buck (2014), Dimitris Skourtis (2014), Adam Crume (2015), Andrew Shewmaker (2016), Lucho Ionkov (2018), Michael Sevilla (2018), Noah Watkins (2018), Ivo Jimenez (2019), and Jianshen Liu (2023). Their passionate curiosity, never-ending sense of wonder, and hard work were the real reason why anything got accomplished.

I want to apologize to my current Ph.D. students for forcing them to pick a new advisor in the middle of their UC Santa Cruz careers. But I’m very happy that they all found great new advisors: Esmaeil Mirvakili is now working with Chen Qian, Farid Zakaria with Andrew Quinn, and Jayjeet Chakraborty with Heiner Litz.

I thank Sage Weil for creating Ceph, for the initial spark of an idea and incredible generosity without which CROSS would not exist, for lending his amazing track record and credibility to CROSS that was essential for recruiting our first industry members, and for sharing his technical expertise in many CROSS research and incubator project reviews. I thank Karen Sandler for writing part of the CROSS membership agreement and, together with Nissa Strottman, sharing their invaluable legal expertise and experience. I thank Doug Cutting for his great guest lectures, sharing his technical expertise, and explaining the Apache Software Foundation to us. I thank Nithya Ruff for championing CROSS at all the important places, and for connecting us to OSPO++, a fantastic community that is helping us establish an OSPO at UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses.

I thank Lavinia Preston, Cynthia McCarley, and Genine Scelfo as well as so many more fantastic individuals in the leadership and staff on all levels of the UC Santa Cruz campus for making everything work and for their skillful navigation of the UC Santa Cruz bureaucracy.

Finally but not least, I thank Scott Brandt for his invaluable support and mentorship without which my career at UC Santa Cruz would not have been possible. It all started when he suggested to me in early 2004, during my leave from industry, to check out the storage systems research group meetings at UC Santa Cruz.

Thank you all!

Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

[This is a copy of the original post]

About the Event

Reproducibility is not just a sound scientific practice – it also has many potential practical applications in teaching and creating new research results. At this event, the attendees will learn about how to package their computer science research experiments in such a way that they are not only reproducible – but also practically reproducible, i.e., capable of being reproduced easily enough to be used as a mainstream method of interactive scientific exploration and exchange.

Sign up to learn about practical reproducibility on Chameleon, receive guidance on packaging your experiments, share insights and feedback on the reproducibility process, and much more!

Get your research out there!

All participants who attend the hackathon and successfully upload an experiment as a reproducible artifact on Trovi by the end of December 2023 will have their artifacts featured on Trovi during January 2024 and receive an invitation to have their research featured in our Chameleon blog.

We hope that participants can use their initial work and what they learn at the Hackathon to make future contributions to reproducibility workshops and conferences such as ACM REP.

Reproducibility Sessions

The Hackathon will consist of three sessions held throughout the day to accommodate folks outside of the Central time zone:

Session I: Tutorial – Packaging Experiments for Practical Reproducibility – 10-12pm CT
Session II: Open Work Period – Packaging Your Experiments – 1-4pm CT
Session III: Open Discussion – Share Your Experience – 4:10-5pm CT

Participants are encouraged, but not required, to attend all three sessions.

I. Tutorial: Packaging Experiments for Practical Reproducibility

Session I will include an overview of Chameleon services, how to run experiments on Chameleon, how to package experiments for reproducibility, how to make such artifacts searchable and shareable, and other best practices for practical reproducibility. If you are interested in learning more about Chameleon Cloud and our digital artifact hub (Trovi), this session is for you!

Concepts may include how to use the NSF-funded Chameleon platform, one of the largest academic clouds, and how to package experiments for reproducibility using this platform; tools and services Chameleon provides to share experiments, including using Jupyter to manage the full experimental workflow including creating the environment, implementing the experiment body, and data analytics; using Chameleon daypass to give access to the testbed for reproducibility; as well as Trovi, an experiment sharing portal integrated with the testbed. The tutorial will also cover the existing experiment patterns available via Trovi representing common elements of experimental configurations such as e.g., configuring storage with RAID, NFS, or RDMA.

II. Open Work Period: Packaging Actual Experiments

During Session II, participants will work on packaging their experiments to share on the Chameleon digital artifact hub, Trovi, following the guidelines covered in Session I. Technical support and “office hours” will be provided for individuals and teams during this session. If you have an experiment that you have been wanting to share with others, this is a great opportunity to finally get that artifact online with some extra help and support from the Chameleon team!

No experiment to share at the moment? No problem! Participants are also encouraged to use this session to reproduce existing artifacts from a curated list of recommended experiments that we will post two weeks before the event.

How to come prepared for reproducibility success:

We recommend that participants who attend this session bring one of their own experiments that they would like to package and make available for reproducibility on Trovi. Experiments that already have an established code base with some documentation on GitHub or other public repositories are typically quicker to package and will be easier to work with during the session. Some knowledge of Chameleon and general cloud computing is also helpful (such as concepts covered in Session I). However, participants are not required to use Session II to package their experiments. Participants can also use the time to run other experiments that are already on Chameleon.

Participants will share their experiences during the hackathon and have time to ask more questions about the platform, give feedback on the Chameleon site, and brainstorm ideas to facilitate experiment reproducibility on public testbeds.

We hope to see you all on December 15!

OSRE 2024 Mentor Info Session

Fri, 17 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Video of Info Session now available

The OSRE organizers will give a brief overview of the Summer 2024 program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor at a Mentor Info Session on November 29 at 10am Pacific Time.

The OSRE funded student … helped us create detailed docs and scripts to easily reproduce our project evaluations. This not only eases our own future work, but also helps us promote our work as other people can easily reproduce our results.

[The program] provided us a great platform to connect with great students and have them join our projects and make progress.

[The OSRE] can be very useful for the sustainability of academic open source projects. It can help identify potential contributors and kick-start the design and implementation of new features.

The urgent need to make the value of open source visible and quantifiable to university leadership

Tue, 01 Aug 2023 00:00:00 +0000

A surprisingly high number

Earlier this year, Frank Wuerthwein, Director of the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC) mentioned to me a number: 32,000. That’s the estimated number of public GitHub repositories that UC San Diego faculty and students have contributed to. This discovery is interesting in at least two ways:

It is an example of an intuitive metric for at least a first-order approximation of the value of open source to the university’s research enterprise, and
Even if it turns out that only a fraction of 32,000 repositories represents significant work, these repositories provide a treasure trove of data to greatly improve that approximation.

Quoting Frank:

There is a sense that 100’s of faculty and thousands of students are contributing or have contributed to open source projects. These numbers were presented in a meeting that high level leadership at UCSD participated (VCR, EVC, CTO, …) and the statement made quite a stir.

Software production will be regulated

It is high time for the leadership of universities to understand the value of open source to their research enterprise. Software is now so important to society and the associated threat of cybercrime so great that legislation to regulate the software industry is coming. At the forefront is the European Union with its proposed Cyber Resiliency Act (CRA) which considers declaring software hazardous and might require as early as next year a burden of documentation and certification to ensure safety of software that is well beyond the means of most open source projects. While the Open Source Initiative, the Linux Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation (see the excellent presentation by Eclipse Executive Director Mike Milinkovich), the Drupal Association, the Apache Software Foundation, and GitHub are among the growing number of organizations that are recognizing the impact of this proposed legislation and are actively lobbying for amendments, there is, according to Milinkovich no engagement from universities (clip from the excellent May 10, 2023 Apereo Micro Conference hosted by Apereo Executive Director Patrick Masson).

Getting universities engaged

I think there is a good reason for this lack of engagement: universities have little to no data to justify engagement. While universities employ considerable staff to carefully track fund raising, publications, student enrollments, licensing income, and all kinds of other indications of societal impact, there are little to no resources dedicated to track the role of software – particularly open source software – in research, reproducibility, teaching, technology transfer, and how universities engage with outside stakeholders.

The “32,000 repositories” number of a single university campus (UC San Diego) extrapolated to all research universities is just one (and very crude) indicator that the potential impact of coming legislation like EU’s CRA might be significant. As the OSPO of UC Santa Cruz, the first within the UC system, we feel an urgent responsibility for making the value of open source visible and quantifiable so that the need to engage becomes obvious.

Proposing the Open source Repo Browser

Luckily, the technologies to help make that a reality already exist: large repository hubs such as GitHub, GitLab, and BitBucket have query APIs for discovering public repositories. We are now working with UC San Diego on extending their repository discovery to other UC campuses towards a University of California system-wide Open source Repository Browser (UC ORB). Sophisticated measurement tools exist that can characterize these repositories, including their research topics, their dependencies, their development processes, their maturity, and their community health. We will partner with Bitergia, the market leader in these tools, to ensure that we apply state of the art from the beginning. Bitergia specializes in providing quality data about open source projects and has a ready-to-use open source platform, CHAOSS GrimoireLab. By leveraging Bitergia’s knowledge and platform, we avoid building tools for which open source solutions already exist and are enabled to focus on the interesting questions that can be answered by working with the data.

Virtuous Cycles of Visibility

This dataset is however only a first approximation of the set of all relevant repositories. To achieve high precision and recall, these queries would have to be continually updated as new research efforts emerge, especially in large multi-campus institutions like the University of California. Thus, we will complement this effort by creating incentives for researchers to register their repositories. One example is the OSPO UC Santa Cruz’ Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) which enables researchers to register their projects with Google Summer of Code and other outreach efforts. Profiling these registered repositories will allow us to identify similar projects in the dataset for targeted promotion of OSPO programs. Thus, while the initial dataset will have imperfect precision and recall, it provides a great starting point for bootstrapping UC ORB and using incentives created by OSPO programs to achieve high precision and recall. We expect that UC ORB’s success will incentivize researchers to more carefully design their repository profiles so their projects are more easily discovered. These optimizations will increase research visibility, and by extension, strengthen the impact of the UC system. We in collaboration with other UC campuses will promote UC ORB to external stakeholders such as Open Source Science (a collaboration between NumFOCUS and IBM Research who are working on mapping the landscape of open source software used in science), companies who are interested in engaging with researchers, and open source foundations who are interested in supporting new technologies.

Reducing the burden of software regulation

UC ORB will be just one instance of valuable datasets that will be hopefully established in many other universities, not only for statistics about the value of open source software but also for university researchers to explore new ways to reduce the burden of supply chain security and software safety assurance. Whatever software regulation is going to look like in the future, there is an urgent need for society to find paths towards greater security and safety without diminishing the flow of innovation. Once the value of open source software becomes visible, universities with their outstanding research talent are in a great position to not only engage but provide valuable insights of how software should be regulated in the future.

Looking for funding

I’m looking for funding for this important project. Please contact me if you or someone you know might be interested in supporting this effort.

A Record 38 Contributors participating in OSRE '23

Sun, 28 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

This year’s Open Source Research Experience is off to a fantastic start, with 38 contributors getting ready to work this summer on projects spanning open source hardware, software, and reproducibility in research and in teaching. Funding for these contributors is provided by the NSF REPETO Project-sponsored Summer of Reproducibility, the 2023 Google Summer of Code, and Baskin Engineering’s Inclusive Excellence Hub.

Check out the Student Pages where contributors have begun blogging updates about their summer projects!

Sponsor Open Source Research Experience

Thu, 23 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Is your organization looking to better utilize open source and want to support projects that directly benefit your work?

Does your company want to strengthen the talent pipeline able to work on technologies essential to your organization’s success?

Do you want to collaborate with innovative open source projects being developed by University of California researchers?

Sponsor Projects –>

The UC Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) offers your organization the chance to participate in projects that can help your development cycles run faster, benefit from wide collaborations, and help support workforce development in domains your organization needs.

To become a sponsor, fill out the Sponsorship Interest Form. You will be asked to indicate the level of sponsorship you would like to fund and the open source projects you are most interested in engaging with.

Overview of Program

The OSRE includes University of California-based open source projects covering multiple disciplines. Our mentors, who are faculty and researchers from throughout the UC system, have provided a list of project ideas that will be the basis for the OSRE student’s work.

Launched in 2020, the Open Source Research Experience program has developed into a marketplace for open source project ideas that matches students to mentors, and engages sponsoring organizations to fund and participate in open source based summer internships. The goal of this program is to increase student capabilities in working in open source, add productive contributors to on-going projects, and further promote open source as a way to engage with communities spanning industry and academia.

OSRE mentors have posted their project ideas for undergraduates to review and help them create proposals for the summer. Industry partners and other outside sponsors can sponsor OSRE summer student funding and indicate their interest in particular projects.

Benefits of sponsorship

Collaborating on innovative project that are of strategic interest to your industry;
Supporting the teaching of open source techniques to a wide range of student contributors;
Interacting with the next generation of open source leaders and up and coming talent; and
Recognition as an OSRE Sponsor at the Open Source Research Symposium (Fall 2023)

Table: OSRE 2023 Sponsorship Levels
Level	Amount
Bronze	$3,750 (covers 50% of one student stipend for summer)
Silver	$7,500 (covers one student full-time for summer)
Gold	$15,000 (covers two students full-time for summer)

Becoming a sponsor is easy! Fill out the Sponsorship Interest Form or reach out to the OSRE Admins by April 20. Information requested by the form include: name of contact person, level of sponsorship, and projects you are most interested in (if applicable.) The OSRE Admins will follow up with next steps for finalizing the sponsorship process.

Sponsor Projects –>

Accepted as 2023 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

We are very excited to have been selected as a 2023 Google Summer of Code Mentor Organization. The 2023 Open Source Research Experience and with it the 2023 Summer of Reproducibility will therefore benefit from GSOC’s world-wide outreach and generous funding of contributors. We are now listed among 172 selected mentor organizations. We are listed under “Data” and “Science and medicine”.

Since 2018, the we have successfully mentored a total of 22 GSoC students. We look forward to mentoring this year’s students.

Interested students can check out our projects for proposal ideas from our mentors. Our projects cover a wide range of topics this year. Students are encouraged to reach out to our mentors during the proposals stage. See our student information section

AMA Session for 2023 Summer of Reproducibility and OSRE Mentors

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

No registration necessary. Join session via zoom or email the OSRE Admins for a calendar invite.

More information on the programs see Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) and the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE).

Please feel free to share this information with any colleagues who you think might be interested or could benefit from participating in this program.

Creating a ROS 2 Open Source Distribution

Thu, 05 Jan 2023 11:15:56 -0700

Abstract: The Robot Operating System (now ROS 2) is an open source middleware for operating robots. Similarly to Linux, Kubernetes, or OpenStack, ROS 2 has grown to be so complex that building ROS 2 from scratch has become impossible for most users. Hence, like in the other examples, users want to use a preconfigured well-integrated open source distribution of ROS 2. Open source distributions are being created in practice, but have not seen any research yet. In this talk, I will outline the challenges I see with building well-integrated, reproducible/verifiable, and certifiable open source distributions using ROS 2 as the example. I will speculate how beyond research, a commercial product could be created.

Audience: Researchers interested in open source, robotics, and startups

Speaker: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, Univ. Erlangen / Bayave GmbH

Bio: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, M.B.A., is the Professor of Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before joining academia, Riehle led the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs, LLC, in Palo Alto, California (Silicon Valley). Riehle founded the Open Symposium, now the international conference on open collaboration. He was also the lead architect of the first UML virtual machine. He is interested in open source and inner source software engineering, agile software development methods, complexity science and human collaboration, and software system architecture, design, and implementation. Prof. Riehle holds a Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zürich and an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He welcomes email at dirk@riehle.org, blogs at https://dirkriehle.com, and tweets as @dirkriehle.

Register for the 2023 Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) Mentor Info Session

Thu, 22 Dec 2022 11:15:56 -0700

Update: If you missed our info sessions so far, recordings are now available. There will be another informal Q&A session on January 26 at 10:30 Pacific Time.

Watch Videos –>

The UCSC Open Source Program Office is excited to introduce the 2023 Summer of Reproducibility (SoR 2023) into the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) program and is looking for researchers and academics interested in being an SoR mentor.

For those of you unfamiliar with the OSRE, this program is modeled after the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which matches undergraduate student contributors with mentors working on open source projects. The goal of the OSRE program is to seed contributor communities of UC-based open source research efforts and to help make computational research efforts reproducible. With this program the OSPO participates as mentor organization in GSoC and other outreach and sponsorship programs.

The OSRE began in 2020 and has included mentors from multiple UC campuses. (Find information about the 2022 OSRE here.) The Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) program is a new joint program with the new NSF-funded, collaborative REPETO Project (U Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, NYU Tandon). The SoR will focus on producing and using reproducibility artifacts as well as give summer students the opportunity to help out in this cutting-edge effort and acquire valuable skills related to reproducibility.

We will give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor. Join us on January 18 at 10:00am Pacific Time to hear about the Summer of Reproducibility followed immediately by an overview of the general OSRE program. Registration for this online event is now open. We will be asking a number of our mentors of the OSRE 2022 program to join in the discussion to share their experiences and we will also highlight the changes in the 2023 program aimed at making the OSRE even more rewarding for both mentors and students.

For a quick overview of what to expect of the OSRE 2023 please see information on the OSPO website. We are also happy to answer any questions prior to the January 18 session.

Please feel free to share this information with any colleagues who you think might be interested or could benefit from participating in this program.

Register for the OSRE 2023 Mentor Info Session

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 11:15:56 -0700

In case you missed our December 13 mentor info session, the recording is available now! (youtube channel)

WATCH HERE

The UCSC Open Source Program Office is excited to once again be sponsoring the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) program in the Summer of 2023 and is looking for researchers and academics interested in being OSRE mentors.

The OSRE began in 2020 and has included mentors from multiple UC campuses. (Find information about the 2022 OSRE here.) A new feature for 2023 is the NSF funded Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) program! A part of the new NSF-funded, collaborative REPETO Project (U Chicago, UC Santa Cruz, NYU Tandon), the SoR will focus on producing and using reproducibility artifacts as well as give summer students the opportunity to help out in this cutting-edge effort and acquire valuable skills related to reproducibility.

We will give a brief overview of the program and discuss the benefits of being an OSRE mentor. Join us on December 13 at 10am Pacific Time. Registration for this online event is now open. We will be asking a number of our mentors the OSRE 2022 program to join in the discussion to share their experiences and we will also highlight the changes in the 2023 program aimed at making the OSRE even more rewarding for both mentors and students.

For a quick overview of what to expect of the OSRE 2023 please see information on the OSPO website. I’m also happy to answer any questions prior to the December 13 session.

Please feel free to share this invitation with any colleagues who you think might be interested or could benefit from participating in this program – both UC-affiliated colleagues working in open source and non-UC researchers that might benefit from the Summer of Reproducibility.

Mentoring FARR Fellow Milad Hakimshafaei

Wed, 26 Oct 2022 11:15:56 -0700

I’m very proud to have the OSPO UC Santa Cruz play a part of Baskin Engineering Inclusive Excellence Hub’s Fellowship for Anti-Racism Research (FARR) by providing mentorship to computational media Ph.D. student Milad Hakimshafaei in his work to expand diverse perceptions in visual design.

Incubator Fellow and PolyPhy Project Lead Oskar Elek and Stephanie Lieggi, executive director for OSPO and the Center for Research in Open Source Software, Hakimshafaei will develop an interface built off of an existing web-based AI generator that will allow the end user to control the system’s behavior to generate interesting and unique patterns. By studying a broad array of users’ visual design aesthetic preferences, he plans to develop algorithms that better represent the experience of beauty for different people.

I encourage you to read the full news release.

OSRE'22 Students Contributors Posters and Final Reports

Thu, 29 Sep 2022 11:15:56 -0700

The UCSC OSPO Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) Program is happy to announce that we had 12 successful summer programs. Ten of these contributors were supported by GSoC – double to the number we have had in 2021. Our other sponsors included Baskin Engineering, Toshiba America and CITRIS. The significant increase in contributor numbers was in large part due to the expansion of the OSRE to include mentors from other UC campuses and affiliated labs. This year the OSRE is excited to have 17 mentors who include researchers and faculty from three UC campuses (Santa Cruz, Riverside, and San Diego) as well one UC-run lab (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab). All these mentors are involved with UC-based open source projects and ecosystems.

Student contributors began working on their projects in mid-June, with most ending by late August/ early September. All summer contributors were asked to create a poster for or provide a presenation at the 2022 Open Source Research Symposium in late September 2022. See links to those posters as well as final products below.

We look forward to holding OSRE 2023 next summer. We will begin recruitment for mentors in the coming months and students at the start of 2023.

Interested in sponsoring this program and getting to know more about open source projects on UC campuses. Contact CROSS’s Executive Director Stephanie Lieggi for more information.

OSRE 2022 Student Contributors

Table: OSRE 2022 Student Contributors
Contributor	Summer Project	Final Products	UC-based OS Project
Mohammad Abdussalam	Geospatial Data Science on AsterixDB	Poster / Product	Asterix
Xuan Xu	Python Interface to HDF5 Asynchronous I/O	Poster / Product	HDF5
Craig White	Create python interface for PDC	Poster / Product	PDC
Talha Ahmed	Register File Generator	Poster / Product	OpenRAM
Arman Avetisyan	OpenLane/SKY130 Demos and tutorials	Poster / Product	OpenRoad
Pranay Mathur	Path finding algorithm using OpenCV and machine learning	Presentation / Product	OSAVC
Bhumil Depani	Driver Module for Open Source Autonomous Vehicle Controller	Presentation / Product	OSAVC
Joshua Angel	Autonomous Vehicle and Sensor Dynamic Simulation with Gazebo	Presentation/ Product	OSAVC
Asavari Ambavane	Develop a website for PolyPhy	Poster / Product	PolyPhy
Patrice Musoke	DevOps for PolyPhy, A Python Library for Polyphorm.	Poster / Product	PolyPhy
Hari Prasad	Discrete graph extraction from simulated scalar fields	Poster / Product	PolyPhy
Rachel Lau	NVMe for Rotational Media	Poster / Product (On-going)	Eusocial Storage

2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 08:30:00 +0000

Join us in creating new communities, partnerships, and collaborations in amplifying research impact with open source.

In Case You Missed It, Recordings from The UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium are available now!

WATCH HERE

This year’s event is organized by the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and we thank our sponsors to help make this event possible. The event follows this code of conduct. It includes keynote speakers, expert panels, and technical workshops, as well as poster presentations highlighting the work of our Open Source Research Experience students. This year we are excited to host keynotes by Demetris Cheatham (GitHub), Nithya Ruff (Amazon), Karsten Wade (Red Hat), and Stephen Walli (Microsoft).

Free for UC affiliated and remote participants
Cost for non-UC affiliated participants: $299

Interested in sponsoring this event? Sponsors get complimentary registration, recognition and other benefits (see below)

Agenda Overview

Tue 9/27 @ UC Santa Cruz Hay Barn (directions). Plenary (single-track) sessions. In-person participation limited to 50 people; remote participation also available.
Wed 9/28 @ UC Santa Cruz Baskin Engineering 2 (directions). Technical Workshops (two-track). In-person participation limited to 60 people; Remote participation also available.
Thu 9/29, Fully Remote. Technical Workshops (single-track).

Detailed Agenda

(separate page or scroll below)

WATCH HERE

Sponsorship Level	Amount	Benefits
Silver Sponsors	$500	Acknowledgements + 1 free registration
Gold Sponsors	$1,000	Acknowledgements + 2 free registrations
Platinum Sponsors	$2,000	Acknowledgements + 4 free registrations

Logistics

Parking

Link to UCSC Campus and Parking Map

Day 1 at Hay Barn: Parking permits will be available near the Hay Barn (lot 170) with overflow parking nearby in lot 116. Parking permits will be available from attendants upon arrival at the Hay Barn. For late arrivals come to the reception desk in the Hay Barn.
Day 2 at Baskin Engineering: Parking permits provided upon arrival at CORE WEST Parking. When you arrive, drive to the third floor of CORE WEST and request a free permit from the attendants. If you arrive after 10am, please go to the parking kiosk at the main entrance to pick up your permit.

Hotels in Santa Cruz

Dream Inn
175 West Cliff Drive, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Call 831-426-4330 and ask for the UCSC rate (rates not available online)
The Hotel Paradox
611 Ocean St., Santa Cruz, 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate
Fairfield Inn and Suites
2956 Mission Street, Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Use code UC0 online for the UCSC rate

NSF will fund design of a support infrastructure for CROSS incubator project

Fri, 09 Sep 2022 19:15:56 -0700

I am delighted to be one of the inaugural Phase 1 awardees of the NSF/TIP Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystems (POSE) program, with Stephanie Lieggi as co-PI. The goal of this 1-year, $300,000 project is to explore support infrastructures for Skyhook Data Management, a graduated CROSS incubator project.

Title: POSE: Phase I: Scoping the Ecosystem of Skyhook Data Management

Abstract: New, well-funded, and fast-moving open source ecosystems around big data and data science have emerged due to the successful business models in hyperscale computing industries. These include the Apache Arrow ecosystem for processing structured data and the Ceph distributed storage ecosystem. Skyhook Data Management embeds Apache Arrow in Ceph and is a result of years of storage systems research at UC Santa Cruz where Ceph originated. Embedding processing of data into storage can dramatically reduce data movement, a major cost center in datacenters. This Phase 1 project explores sustainable and effective pathways for establishing open source as an alternative translation for technologies using Skyhook as a pilot project. The project’s novelties are a series of workshops which are convening open source experts and community leaders with diverse backgrounds to figure out governance, staffing and staff retention strategies for Skyhook while also building out expertise for open tech transfer within the university. As co-founder of the Ceph project, as founder and leader of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Open Source Software and the Open Source Program Office UC Santa Cruz the investigators are well-positioned to convene these workshops due to their professional network of open source experts in industry and foundations. An important focus in these workshops is inclusiveness to foster a diverse community and encourage participation from historically excluded communities. The project’s impacts are the adoption of Skyhook technology for production, for reproducible research prototyping, and as a teaching tool in classrooms, and the establishment of open source as a viable translation path of technologies for research universities.

Apache Arrow is a representation of columnar data in memory which has created a wide-ranging and rapidly growing open source ecosystem of efficient data processing with many different programming language bindings (so far C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Julia, MATLAB, Python, R, Ruby, and Rust). Due to the common representation, data can move efficiently without conversion between the ecosystem’s processing engines running on different systems. Data processing and exchange can be implemented with a number of building blocks that includes the Parquet file format, the Flight framework for efficient data interchange between processes, the Gandiva LLVM-based JIT computation for executing analytical expressions by leveraging modern CPU SIMD instructions to process Arrow data, the Acero streaming execution engine for query plans, and Awkward Array for restructuring computation on columnar and nested data. On top of these building blocks exist a number of Arrow integration frameworks, including the Fletcher framework that integrates FPGAs with Apache Arrow, Nvidia’s RAPIDS cuDF framework that integrates GPUs with Apache Arrow, the Plasma high-performance shared-memory object store, and the Substrait open format for query plans between query optimizers and processing engines. Skyhook integrates Ceph with Arrow by embedding Arrow processing engines within Ceph storage objects such that objects can be accessed via Apache Arrow API calls that are executed on a storage server. API calls are atomic and, in case of failures, Ceph automatically remaps the call to another server where the object is available due to storage redundancy. Skyhook aims to become a research prototyping ecosystem and a blueprint for efficiently embedding data processing libraries in storage systems and computational storage devices while enabling processing and storage ecosystems to evolve independently.

NSF award will support project to promote reproducibility in computer science

Sat, 27 Aug 2022 18:18:18 -0700

(This is a slightly edited version of this UCSC news release).

With the support of a three-year, $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Adjunct Professor of Computer Science and Engineering Carlos Maltzahn and the UC Santa Cruz Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) will participate in collaborative research to increase the reproducibility of computer science research.

This grant comes from the inaugural year of an NSF initiative, called Findable Accessible Interoperable Reusable (FAIR) Open Science Research Coordination Networks (FAIROS RCN), to create groups of researchers who lead by example to promote open science results and artifacts. Overall, 10 new project groups were funded to pool $12.5 million into creating open source communities, which foster a vibrant exchange of artifacts within common infrastructure.

“There’s a huge shift going on,” said Maltzahn, director of UCSC CROSS. “I think it has to do with the realization of how much value the industry places on open source, and that open science and networks of expertise have to be more inclusive and involve stakeholders across academia, industry, government and open source communities. That becomes especially important when you talk about revitalizing U.S. high tech manufacturing.”

Maltzahn will work with the REPETO project, a group focused on practical reproducibility in computer science research. Reproducibility allows researchers to verify findings, accelerate the research process to more quickly gain insights, and have their products more widely used in research labs, classrooms, and industry. It also helps students gain a deeper understanding of the original researcher’s thought process.

Involving researchers from the University of Chicago and New York University, the REPETO project strives to make the reproducibility of computer science practical – where many experiments can be repeated cost-effectively. Overall, they will create infrastructure, teach and mentor students, lead workshops, and create community best practices related to this goal.

Through these efforts, Maltzahn and his collaborators hope to better understand and foster the “market of reproducibility” to ensure that artifacts, such as pieces of software, are available for replication, but that those artifacts are both useful and used.

“The aim of REPETO is that both creating reproducible artifacts is really easy, and consuming those artifacts is really easy,” Maltzahn said. “The overall thought is that convenient reproducibility artifacts will accelerate the cycle of research, so you will get a much faster succession of insights and a powerful toolkit to improve student training.”

UCSC’s role in this project will be to convene a world-wide program in 2023 called the “Summer of Reproducibility,” following the model of CROSS’s Open Source Research Experience program, which matches students with mentors working on open source projects. Similarly, for the REPETO project, undergraduate students participating in the Summer of Reproducibility will work to replicate a published piece of research.

This will allow students to gain a deeper understanding of the experiments they have repeated as compared to just reading about them, and allow the mentors to better understand what is needed in order for their work to be truly reproducible.

Maltzahn will collaborate with Assistant Director of UCSC CROSS Stephanie Lieggi to put on the Summer of Reproducibility. He will collaborate with lead principal investigator Kate Keahey, senior computer scientist at Argonne National Lab and CASE Senior Scientist affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Chicago, Haryadi Gunawi, associate professor of computer science at University of Chicago, and Fraida Fund, research assistant professor in electrical and computer engineering at NYU.

The University of Chicago researchers will focus on building and maintaining the infrastructure to make practical reproducibility possible. They will also convene workshops on topics around reproducibility. NYU will focus on best practices for teaching and applying reproducibility in the classroom.

With connections made through researchers interested in reproducibility as part of the Association for Computer Machinery Emerging Interest Group for Reproducibility effort, Maltzahn and team have created an international steering committee for the project, involving people across disciplines including computer science, library science, and social science.

All of the 10 FAIROS RCN awardee groups are expected to work together in sharing artifacts and will have monthly meetings led by the program director. UC San Diego’s Supercomputer Center (SDSC) is also part of the cohort, making the UC system a major participant in this initiative. Members of the cohort such as the North Carolina Central University provide exciting outreach opportunities to students and faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions (MCIs).

Register: 2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 11:22:07 -0700

The UC Open Source Research Symposium (successor to the CROSS Research Symposia series) is happy to be able to mix in-person, hybrid and fully remote activities in an effort to provide a larger audience the opportunity to learn about open source research at the University of California. Participants can interact with UC faculty, graduate students, and affiliated researchers, and discuss future directions and discover areas of collaboration from campuses throughout the UC system.

Returning after a two year hiatus, the Symposium will once again include the annual UC Santa Cruz Systems Research Lab’s Oktoberfest barbeque on the evening of the first day of the symposium.

Symposium Details →

2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Wed, 27 Jul 2022 11:22:07 -0700

Agenda and registration information is here.

Hybrid In-Person and Online Event

Registration to open in late August!

The UC Open Source Research Symposium (successor to the CROSS Research Symposia series) is happy to be able to mix in-person, hybrid and fully remote activities in an effort to provide a larger audience the opportunity to learn about the cutting edge open source research being done throughout the University of California. Participants can interact with UC faculty, graduate students, and affiliated researchers, and discuss future directions and discover areas of collaboration from campuses throughout the UC system.

AND returning after a two year hiatus, the Symposium will once again include the annual UC Santa Cruz Systems Research Lab’s Oktoberfest barbeque on the evening of the first day of the symposium.

This year’s event is organized by the UC Santa Cruz Open Source Program Office (OSPO) and sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and CROSS. It will include keynote speakers, expert panels, and technical workshops, as well as poster presentations highlighting the work of our Open Source Research Experience students.

Cost for non-UC affiliated participants: $299

Interested in Sponsoring this Event? Contact Stephanie Lieggi. Sponsors get complimentary registration, recognition and other benefits

Tentative Agenda

September 27, 2022

Venue: UC Santa Cruz Hay Barn
In-person participation limited to 50 people; Remote participation also available

Plenary sessions including keynote speakers, expert panels and poster sessions.
Day closes with the return of the 12th UCSC Systems / CROSS sponsored Oktoberfest BBQ!

September 28, 2022

Venue: UC Santa Cruz Baskin Engineering 2
In-person participation limited to 60 people; Remote participation also available

Technical workshops (two tracks) focusing on open source research and communities at UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses.

September 29, 2022

Venue: Online Only

Technical workshops as well as presentations by contributors from the Open Source Research Experience Program.

OSPO UC Santa Cruz funded

Wed, 18 May 2022 11:22:07 -0700

(This is a slightly edited version of this UCSC news release).

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awarded Professor Carlos Maltzahn a $695,000 two-year grant aimed at establishing an open source program office (OSPO) that will serve the entire campus community. The new OSPO will be one of the first four in the United States to have such an office (John Hopkins, RIT, and Vermont are the others) and one of only two public universities.

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) are an organizational innovation developed initially by companies in the tech sector as a way to manage the relationships with open source software ecosystems of strategic importance to their business. The UC Santa Cruz OSPO, together with the three other offices, are adapting this OSPO concept to build on the missions of research universities of research, teaching, and public service.

“We’re extremely excited about the establishment of university open source program offices and their potential to legitimize and improve the development of open source software across the research enterprise,” said Joshua Greenberg, director of the Sloan Foundation’s technology program. “We’re especially proud to support the establishment of an office at UC Santa Cruz. This work is being led by an accomplished team and represents an exciting development for the campus—as well as offering a blueprint for other UC schools.”

The UC Santa Cruz OSPO will transcend the scope of Baskin Engineering’s Center for Research for Open Source Software (CROSS) but not replace it. CROSS will continue its education, research, and incubator programs, with an increased focus on the topics of interest of its industry sponsors. CROSS was started by Maltzahn in 2015 to bridge the gap between student work and successful open source projects. Since its establishment, CROSS has raised $2.6 million in industry funding.

“By generously sponsoring CROSS, major corporations including Toshiba, Kioxia, Micron, SK Hynix, Seagate, Western Digital, Samsung, and Fujitsu clearly signaled that industry-university research collaboration via open source strategies and techniques works,” observed Maltzahn. “Thanks to their engagement and Sloan Foundation’s funding, we now have an opportunity to significantly expand this collaboration in innovative ways.”

As noted by Interim Vice Chancellor for Research John MacMillan, “The UCSC Office of Research will work closely with the OSPO team at cross-divisional and corporate engagement and help track funding of open source projects within the university. We are pleased that the Sloan Foundation chose to fund UC Santa Cruz’s efforts in open source – making it the first UC campus with an OSPO. We think this pilot project will allow UC Santa Cruz to be a model for UC campuses and other public universities.”

As part of the Sloan Foundation award, the OSPO introduces a new incubator fellowship aimed at attracting postdoctoral scholars whose compelling and innovative open source research projects make them natural open source ambassadors to UC Santa Cruz. The OSPO will establish a teaching fellowship to encourage innovation in teaching students how to productively engage with open source projects.. The OSPO will also promote and track funding of open source research efforts to help estimate the value of open source to UC Santa Cruz and the UC system as a whole.

The OSPO team, led by Maltzahn and CROSS Assistant Director Stephanie Lieggi, runs the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) program, an exchange of summer project ideas that matches student contributors and sponsors with mentors working on open source research efforts. As part of the OSPO, the OSRE will be able to expand and engage mentors across UC campuses and associated national labs.

Maltzahn summarized: “The Open Source Research Experience is the kind of OSPO program we want: inclusive and easy to engage with, highly rewarding, scalable across multiple UC campuses, well-aligned with the goals and desires of stakeholders, and increasing in value with the number of contributors.”

For more on the OSPO and how it works, check out the recent feature published by the Red Hat Research Quarterly and the OSPO UC Santa Cruz website, ospo.ucsc.edu.

17 OSRE Students Contributing to UC-Based OS Projects

Thu, 31 Mar 2022 11:15:56 -0700

The UCSC OSPO Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) Program is excited to announce that our mentors will work with 17 student contributors this summer. This includes 14 contributors sponsored by the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) under the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) mentor organization. Aside from GSoC, OSRE sponsors this year include Toshiba America Electronic Components, and Baskin Engineering Inclusive Excellence Hub (IEH), and CITRIS.

This is the most students to be supported by the OSRE program since its inception in 2020, and almost doubles the number of OSRE students in 2021. Most notably, the number of GSoC contributor slots is nearly triple the slots awarded to CROSS in 2021. This significant increase in GSoC support is in large part due to the expansion of the OSRE to include mentors from other UC campuses and affiliated labs. This year the OSRE is excited to include 18 mentors who include researchers and faculty from three UC campuses (Santa Cruz, Riverside, and San Diego) as well one UC-run lab (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab). All these mentors are involved with UC-based open source projects and ecosystems.

OSRE mentors posted project ideas for contributors on the Project Ideas page in early 2022 and began advising interested contributors in February. Interested students/contributors submitted their project proposals in April and slots were announced on May 19. The CROSS/OSPO organization administrators received 53 applications this year through the GSoC portal – a 33% increase from the 2021 application pool.

Student contributors begin working on their projects in mid-June, ending in late August/ early September. All summer contributors will be asked to present their work at the Open Source Research Symposium scheduled to take place in late September 2022 (in-person at UC Santa Cruz as well as remote.) The OSPO will also be highlighting the work of these contributors throughout the summer, so come back to check out the progress.

OSRE 2022 Student Contributors

Table: OSRE 2022 Student Contributors
Contributor	Summer Project	Country	Contributor’s Affiliation	UC-based OS Project
Mohammad Abdussalam	Geospatial Data Science on AsterixDB	Egypt	Alexandria University	Asterix
Sridhar Dhamija	DirtViz: Visualize Sensor Data	India	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, K.K. Birla Goa Campus	DirtVix
Xuan Xu	Python Interface to HDF5 Asynchronous I/O	China	Zhengzhou University	HDF5
Craig White	Create python interface for PDC	USA	Florida Polytechnic University	PDC
Talha Ahmed	Register File Generator	Pakistan	Usman Institute of Technology	OpenRAM
Arman Avetisyan	OpenLane/SKY130 Demos and tutorials	Armenia	National Polytech University	OpenRoad
Chamika Sudusinghe	VLSI Power Planning and Analysis	Sri Lanka	University of Moratuwa,	OpenRoad
Nimra Khan	Demos and Tutorials	Pakistan	Usman Institute of Technology	OpenRoad
Pranay Mathur	Path finding algorithm using OpenCV and machine learning	India	Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani	OSAVC
Bhumil Depani	Driver Module for Open Source Autonomous Vehicle Controller	India	Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of	OSAVC
Joshua Angel	Autonomous Vehicle and Sensor Dynamic Simulation with Gazebo	USA	UC Santa Cruz	OSAVC
Asavari Ambavane	Develop a website for PolyPhy	India	Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute	PolyPhy
Patrice Musoke	DevOps for PolyPhy, A Python Library for Polyphorm.	USA	Temple University	PolyPhy
Hari Prasad	Discrete graph extraction from simulated scalar fields	India	T.K.M College of Engineering	PolyPhy
Kwan Ting (Kestino) Lau	Creating new data visualization regimes	USA	University of Michigan	PolyPhy
Rupesh Gelal	Developing website and writing content for PolyPhy	Nepal	Nepal Engineering College	PolyPhy
Rachel Lau	NVMe for Rotational Media	USA	UC Santa Cruz	Eusocial Storage

News | UCSC OSPO

The First Annual UC Open Highlights Open Source Innovation in the UC System

Highlights from Day One included:

Highlights from Day Two included:

Sponsors and Support

Platinum Sponsors: Red Hat, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Looking to 2026!

Accepted as 2025 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

OSRE 2025 Mentor Info Session

SoR 2025 Mentor Info Session

UC Network Joins UN OSPOs For Good to Enhance Global Collaboration on Sustainability Goals

UC OSPO Network Launched

40 Contributors participating in OSRE '24

Summer 2024 OSRE supporting 40 students working on Open Source and Reproductivity

Accepted as 2024 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

OSRE 2024 Mentor Info Session

I'm retiring!

Virtual Reproducibility Hackathon

About the Event

Reproducibility Sessions

I. Tutorial: Packaging Experiments for Practical Reproducibility

II. Open Work Period: Packaging Actual Experiments

How to come prepared for reproducibility success:

III. Open Discussion: Share Your Experience

OSRE 2024 Mentor Info Session

The urgent need to make the value of open source visible and quantifiable to university leadership

A surprisingly high number

Software production will be regulated

Getting universities engaged

Proposing the Open source Repo Browser

Virtuous Cycles of Visibility

Reducing the burden of software regulation

Looking for funding

A Record 38 Contributors participating in OSRE '23

Sponsor Open Source Research Experience

Overview of Program

Benefits of sponsorship

OSRE Sponsor Levels

Becoming a Sponsor

Accepted as 2023 GSoC Mentor Organiztion

AMA Session for 2023 Summer of Reproducibility and OSRE Mentors

Creating a ROS 2 Open Source Distribution

Register for the 2023 Summer of Reproducibility (SoR) Mentor Info Session

Register for the OSRE 2023 Mentor Info Session

Mentoring FARR Fellow Milad Hakimshafaei

OSRE'22 Students Contributors Posters and Final Reports

OSRE 2022 Student Contributors

2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Join us in creating new communities, partnerships, and collaborations in amplifying research impact with open source.

Agenda Overview

Detailed Agenda

Sponsors

Platinum Sponsors

Gold Sponsors

Silver Sponsors

Sponsor Benefits

Logistics

Parking

Hotels in Santa Cruz

NSF will fund design of a support infrastructure for CROSS incubator project

NSF award will support project to promote reproducibility in computer science

Register: 2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

2022 UC Santa Cruz Open Source Symposium

Hybrid In-Person and Online Event

Registration to open in late August!

Cost for non-UC affiliated participants: $299

Tentative Agenda

September 27, 2022

September 28, 2022

September 29, 2022

Sponsors

OSPO UC Santa Cruz funded

17 OSRE Students Contributing to UC-Based OS Projects

OSRE 2022 Student Contributors