Ruby Science Foundation

License: New and Simplified BSD licenses

Web Page: https://github.com/SciRuby/sciruby/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code-2015-Ideas

Mailing List: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sciruby-dev

We believe that the time for a Ruby science and visualization package has come. Sometimes when a solution of sugar and water becomes super-saturated, from it precipitates a pure, delicious, and diabetes-inducing crystal of sweetness, induced by no more than the tap of a finger. So it is today with numeric and visualization libraries for Ruby.

The SciRuby project is oriented towards providing computational research infrastructure. Infrastructure was the single common area of need identified by scientists, researchers, and engineers in discussions at the GSoC 2013 mentor summit. SciRuby consists of a fairly large number of gems, including statsample, statsample-glm, statsample-timeseries, distribution, minimization, integration, rubyvis, plotrb, Nyaplot, MDArray, Publisci, Ruby-Band, and NMatrix.

The last of these has been awarded grants by the Ruby Association (which develops the Ruby language) as well as Brighter Planet, and has a goal of supplying Ruby with a robust, versatile linear algebra library with support for both dense and sparse matrices. Statsample and its related packages (e.g., distribution) aim to provide the Ruby language with statistical analysis packages.

A major portion of our gems have been written by GSoC students — including Nyaplot, plotrb, PubliSci, Ruby-Band, statsample-timeseries, and statsample-glm. Others, like minimization and integration, have been overhauled over the course of Summer of Code projects.

Working on SciRuby is a chance to get involved at the ground floor on a project which is viewed as critical by many Rubyists, including Ruby's creator, Matz. Further, since we are a science-related project, we expect that successful student projects could lead to publications. Better yet, you might get to see your code go into orbit, or used to save lives in biomedical research.

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