Like last year, the event revolved around a series of lightning talks where Google Summer of Code students and mentors in Chicago talked about their upcoming work, and Google engineers talked about cool stuff they are involved in. Among the evening's highlights, there was mingling:
Whereas last year we were greeted by the Tower of Hanoi of Chinese Food, this year we were met by the Mexican Food Buffet of Awesomeness:
The talks took place in Google's offices on the 17th floor of a downtown building, with stunning views of the city:
(That tall black building is the John Hancock Center )
Our Google Summer of Code speakers were (left to right, top to bottom):
- Derek Schaefer (DePaul University), who will be working for MySQL to improve the import functionality of phpMyAdmin
- Chelsea Bingiel (University of Chicago), who will be adding support for the Atom Publishing Protocol in Plone .
- Dev Ghosh (Northwestern University), who will be adding a new "mosaic mode" for Hugin/Panotools .
- Dirk Eddelbuettel (R Foundation, mentor), who told us all about the cool Google Summer of Code projects the R Foundation has mentored and will mentor this year.
Not pictured are a couple other Google Summer of Code students from Chicago who couldn't make it to the meetup or did not give talks: Joe Doliner (University of Chicago, student for BRL-CAD), Caden Howell (DePaul University, student for the Electronic Frontier Foundation), Chandra Ramachandran (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, student for the National Center for Supercomputing Applications ), and Ori Rawlings (Illinois Institute of Technology, student for the Natural User Interface Group).
Our Google speakers were (left to right) Nathaniel Manista, Jon Trowbridge, and Jacob Lee, who provided us with a steady supply of very amusing slides.
Oodles of thanks go to Google for hosting this event (specially to Jon Trowbridge, organizer extraordinaire) and congratulations to our Chicago-area students for making it into Google Summer of Code!
