Machine learning open source software

Posted on June 12, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

mloss.org Cheng Soon Ong just emailed me about mloss.org, a community creating a comprehensive open source machine learning environment. Mloss.org is essentially a community portal with lots of detailed information about each of the listed projects. One of the more interesting features of their site is that they’ve tied specific software to publication in an associated journal, the Journal of Machine Learning Research to make it easy for users of the software to find and maintain a citation trail to the work of the original developers. The journal itself encourages open source submissions and automatically ties publication of papers related to the software to appearance at the portal.

This last bit is a very clever idea. Would a broader electronic journal (perhaps the Journal of Open Science) would be a useful way to give open projects (Open Source, Open Data, Open Notebook) more citation currency?

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Posted in open science, Software | 3 Comments

Scientific Software Wants To Be Free

Posted on May 26, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

Go read this wonderful manifesto over at arXiv: Astronomical Software Wants To Be Free: A Manifesto by Weiner et al. The authors talk about some of the barriers to astronimical software development that are true in all scientific fields. The chief barrier they see is that there are no incentives (and are some real disincentives) for authors to release software and documentation to other users. The recommendations are great (modified here only to include all scientific fields):

  • We should create an open central repository location at which authors can release software and
    documentation.
  • Software release should be an integral and funded part of projects.
  • Software release should become an integral part of the publication process.
  • The barriers to publication of methods and descriptive papers should be lower.
  • Programming, statistics and data analysis should be an integral part of the curriculum.
  • There should be more opportunities to fund grass-roots software projects of use to the wider community.
  • We should develop institutional support for science programs that attract and support talented scientists who generate software for public release.

The whole thing is a great read. Check it out!

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Posted in open science, Policy, Science | 4 Comments

meep

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

meep is a free finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulation software package developed at MIT to model electromagnetic systems.
Find meep at: http://ab-initio.mit.edu/meep/

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Posted in Physics | Leave a comment

CAMFR

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

CAMFR (CAvity Modelling FRamework) is a fast, flexible, friendly full-vectorial Maxwell solver. Its main focus is on applications in the field of nanophotonics, like wavelength-scale microstructures, lasers and light-emitting diodes.
Find CAMFR at: http://camfr.sourceforge.net/

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Posted in Optics | Leave a comment

LaserFOAM

Posted on May 14, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

Solves the Nonlinear Schrdinger equation using the split-step Fourier method in order to simulate the propagation of an ultrashort laser pulse in photonic crystal fibers.
Find LaserFOAM at: http://laserfoam.sourceforge.net/

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Posted in Optics | Leave a comment

ApexKB (formerly Jumper)

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

ApexKB is enterprise web-infrastructure for data virtualization. ApexKB lets you search and share high-value data across remote locations using tag metadata to capture knowledge about data in remote data stores. It collects these meta-tag profiles in a Knowledge base and search engine.
Find ApexKB (formerly Jumper) at: http://www.trilexnet.com/labs/jumper/

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Posted in Information Technology | Leave a comment

JPIV Particle Image Velocimetry

Posted on April 8, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

JPIV is a software package for Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). The program is open source and platform independent.
Find JPIV Particle Image Velocimetry at: http://www.jpiv.vennemann-online.de/

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Posted in Engineering | Leave a comment

LOPTI is mathematical optimization open source C++ library (mostly derivative-free)

Posted on March 24, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

There are three major parts. 1st and main part is solver-driver which either wraps external solver or uses LOPTI native solvers and presents to library user consistent and simple optimization API. 2nd part is collection of solvers. Currently 4 solvers are included (or supported): NEWUOA, CONDOR, Nelder-Mead (simplex) and Hook-Jeevs. All these solvers are derivative free and have open source (GPL or BSD like) licences. Some of them (Condor) are unchanged and treated as black-box. Some of them (NEWUOA – fortran source) went through heavy modification to interface with LOPTI. And other (Hook-Jeevs) were completely rewritten into LOPTI native solver. 3rd part is collection of object function and object function modifiers.
Find LOPTI is mathematical optimization open source C++ library (mostly derivative-free) at: http://volnitsky.com/project/lopti

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Posted in Optimization | Leave a comment

Aciqra

Posted on March 21, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

Aciqra is an open source virtual planetarium which tracks the locations of planets, the sun and moon along with Earth’s shadow and displays the phases of the moon and planets in realtime. The program also includes several widgets which give it added functionality including Epidermidis graphing, planet location lister, an Eclipse finder and a conjunction engine.
Find Aciqra at: http://aciqra.sourceforge.net/

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Posted in Astronomy | Leave a comment

xeo

Posted on March 5, 2009 by Dan Gezelter

xeo is a free (GPL) open project management for nanostructures using Java
Find xeo at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/xeo

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Posted in Chemical Information | Leave a comment