This Concludes This Version of Google Summer of Code

I am happy to announce that the DevoWorm group's first Google Summer of Code student has successfully completed his project! Congrats to Siddharth Yadav from IIT-New Delhi, who completed his project "Image Processing with ImageJ (segmentation of high-resolution images)".

Our intrepid student intern

His project completion video is located on the DevoWorm YouTube channel. This serves as a counterpart to his "Hello World" video at the beginning of the project. The official project repo is located here. Not only did Siddharth contribute to the data science efforts of DevoWorm but also contributed to the OpenWorm Foundation's public relations committee.

Screenshot from project completion video

As you will see from the video, a successful project proceeds by organizing work around a timeline, and then modifying that timeline as roeadblocks and practical considerations are taken into account. This approach resulted in a tool that can be used by a diverse research community immediately for data extraction, or build upon in the form of future projects. 

In terms of general advice for future students, communicate potential problems early and often. If you get hung up on a problem, put it aside for awhile and work on another part of the project. As a mentor, I encourage students to follow up on methods and areas of research that is most successful in their hands [1]. In this way, students can find and build upon their strengths, while also achieving some level of immediate success. 

NOTES:

[1] This seems like a good place to plug the Orthogonal Research Lab's Open Career Development project. In particular, check out our laboratory contribution philosophy.