Congratulations to our Summer of Code Students!

This year’s Summer of Code participants have been announced. For the MetaBrainz Foundation, we will have these four students hacking:

• Roman Tsukanov (Gentlecat): After having made a name for himself last year, Roman returns to hack on AcousticBrainz for us this year. His project, that he is already a good ways into (surprise!), is to create a data set creator for AcousticBrainz. This project will allow anyone to create a data set that will be used to train the high level descriptors in AcousticBrainz. We’re hoping to crowd source this data set creation task in an effort bust open the walled gardens that normally contain this type of work/research.
• Shadab Zafar (dufferzafar): Duffer is also a returning student for us. Last year he hacked on the Picard website and this year he will pick up where Roman left off working on CritiqueBrainz. He will work on the moderation interface and if there is time he will add support for reviewing places, events and works.
• Ruchiranga Wickramasinghe (ruchiranga): Ruchiranga is new to MetaBrainz this year and will be working on a unified browse and search interface for MusicBrainz. Our current search facilities are still quite primitive and we’ve recently turned off our browsing features since they were effectively useless. This project aims to bring MusicBrainz browse and search into modern times.
• Jeff Weeks (weeksio): Jeff is going to continue Mineo’s work on moving our search infrastructure over to SOLR. This project was started last year, but we knew that it might not be completed in the course of the summer. Unfortunately Mineo was not available to continue the work on the project, but we have high hopes that Jeff will move the project along, in hopes of us pushing it live towards the end of the summer.

I wanted to give a warm welcome and wish our students the best of luck for the summer! Now one final parting observation: This is the first time that we have an equal number of MusicBrainz projects to non-MusicBrainz projects. We’re finally growing the scope of efforts of the MetaBrainz Foundation!