Marcus D. Hanwell's Blog - GSoC

Conferences: Talking Open Science at OSCON, Desktop Summit and Chemical Databases Meeting

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 20:37:00 -0400

Over the last two months I have had one of my most hectic travel schedules ever. It started withOSCON, and a panel discussion about "Practicing Open Science". This one was a bit of a surprise, as Bill Hoffman was originally presenting with Will Schroeder and Brian Wylie, from Sandia National Laboratories. As Bill couldn't make it we decided to change the content of my section, and talk about the new open chemistry area that I have been working on for about four years now. Will went first, followed by me and a wrap up from Brian, with a nice flow between Kitware working on open science for over a decade, me growing a new area of open science (now at Kitware) and Brian giving a government perspective on open source and open science. The slides are below and on slideshare if you would like to take a look.

Oscon 2011 Practicing Open Science

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I thoroughly enjoyed OSCON, and would love to attend future events. The toughest thing was deciding which talks to attend as there were often multiple tracks with talks of interest to me. This was also by far the largest and most commercialized open source event I have attended so far, in the beautiful city of Portland, OR. I couldn't stick around for long after the conference as I was flying out to England on the following Tuesday, and on to Berlin, Germany Friday to attend the Desktop Summit. This was my first time in Germany, and I was looking forward to exploring Berlin a little, along with some time to catch up with a few family and friends in England before and after the conference. I talked about "Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data" on the final day of the main conference, and was very pleased to have a large and interested audience. Here I also discussed my work in open chemistry, along with a lot of the other work we do at Kitware in the Scientific Computing group.

Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data

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I stayed for the remainder of the conference, attending my first KDE e.V. meeting, and was joined by Bill Hoffman towards the end of the week. Bill gave a workshop on using CMake, and I helped out with that, along with taking part in several BoF sessions and meetings. It was a very hectic week, very different feel to OSCON with a lot of great presentations, BoFs and hacking sessions. I also had the opportunity to meet up with Alexander Neundorf who was an intern at Kitware for half a year, and several other KDE developers interested in build systems, software process, testing, coverage and related areas.

Then I was back home for just over a week before braving the elements and heading straight for the path of hurricane Irene. I was invited to the 5th Meeting on U.S. Government Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry where I talked about "Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry on the Desktop". This meeting was very focused on chemical databases and the open chemistry I have been working on so hard for the last few years. It was a great experience to be able to see what others are working on, and discuss possible points for future collaboration. There is some amazing work happening in this area, and this meeting helped me gain greater clarity on how my work at Kitware can fit into the larger picture to significantly improve the landscape in open chemistry.

Chemical Databases and Open Chemistry on the Desktop

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Thanks to Kitware for allowing me to attend, and funding my travel/other expenses, and to my wife and son for tolerating my long absences over the last couple of months. An even bigger thank you to my wife, Louise, for letting me off the hook on my first missed wedding anniversary so that I could present at OSCON! I had some great news about funding for the continued development of many of the ideas discussed in the slides, and so hope to have much more to talk about over the coming months (and years). This post is already pretty long, I hope to continue developing this work and promoting open science, especially in chemistry, materials science, physics and the bio areas. There are lots of other amazing people working in these areas too, and I feel like we are getting to a point where we can create real change to improve the outlook in scientific research.

Talking About Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data at the Desktop Summit

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:20:00 -0400

I have begun my journey to the Desktop Summit, making the flight over from the US to Manchester yesterday. A short stay in Sheffield, and catch up with family before heading out to get my flight to Berlin tomorrow. I will be talking about the work I have done both at and before joining Kitware with the title "Open Source Visualization of Scientific Data". I plan to talk about a range of work from my Google Summer of Code project on Kalzium back in 2007, through to some of the exciting work at Kitware in VTK, ParaView and Titan looking at the challenges of large data, remote visualization and how to integrate the web and smartphones/tablets into the scientific data visualization workflow.

Bill Hoffman is also planning to attend, and we will be running a workshop introducing CMake on Thursday. This is my first Desktop Summit, although Bill and I have both attended previous aKademy and Camp KDE meetings. I should be in on time to attend the pre-registration event, and will not be leaving until Saturday. Looking forward to a great summit, catching up with some old friends and making some new ones. Now, I think I should try to get some sleep before my flight tomorrow!

Talking at OSCON 2011 about Open Science

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:30:00 -0400

I am currently on a plane bound for Portland, Oregon enjoying the in-plane wi-fi. Will Schroeder, Brian Wylie and I will be talking about "Practicing Open Science" on Friday in the government track. I am standing in for Bill Hoffman who unfortunately could not make it, and will be discussing the work I have been doing to grow open chemistry both at Kitware and outside of Kitware with many amazing collaborators scattered around the world. I am really excited to have the opportunity to talk at OSCON, and would be happy to meet up and discuss this work if you are at OSCON. Will and Brian are both very passionate about open science too, they will both give their unique perspectives on practicing open science. I will be there from this evening and don't fly out until early Saturday morning.

I am very much looking forward to OSCON, and the major difficulty I have had is choosing between the talks that are all happening at the same time. In some cases there are two or three I would like to see in any given slot. I am hoping to attend the KDE release party tomorrow too, please join us there if you would like to celebrate with us.

Avogadro 1.0.3 Released

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 12:58:39 -0400

I am pleased to be able to announce the availability of Avogadro 1.0.3! What happened to Avogadro 1.0.2 I hear you ask...shortly after tagging Michael reported an issue with i18n building/installations. So 1.0.3 contains a couple of very small build system fixes, but see the 1.0.2 release notes for details of most of the fixes.

As always, we appreciate your feedback. There are still a few issues outstanding, but many things were fixed. These binaries are also built against much newer versions of Qt and Open Babel where significant improvements have also been made. There may be one or two more releases of the 1.0 line if necessary (I have streamlined the release process with a view to making more releases), but I would like to focus our efforts on an unstable release for 1.1. Once 1.1 is stable, a 1.2.0 release will be cut and branched. There are lots of new features in master that we would love more feedback on.

Blue Obelisk Award

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 13:22:45 -0400

At the recent ACS Spring meeting I attended the Blue Obelisk dinner, where I was honored to receive a Blue Obelisk award, pictured below, for my contributions to Open Data, Open Standards and Open Source. This is largely due to the work I have done on Avogadro, Open Babel and other open source chemistry tools.

This was one of the biggest dinners I have had the opportunity to attend, and I got to meet many of the people I have worked with (or used their work), along with several people I had not had the opportunity to work with yet, but hope to in the future. We presented the work we had been doing on Quixote project at the chemical information symposium on chemistry and the internet, after attending the first Quixote meeting the previous week (thank you to Hartree Centre for inviting me to speak there, and sponsoring the event).

These are exciting times, thank you very much to Peter Murray-Rust for presenting me with the award, and all of the support he has shown, along with his relentless passion for open science. I have only been a part of this for a few years, but Peter has been working on opening up chemistry for decades now.

Visualization Toolkit (VTK) in the Google Summer of Code

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 12:38:32 -0400

As I already mentioned on the Kitware blog, the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) has been accepted as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code this year. You can see the VTK entry in Melange, and browse through our project ideas. I have taken part in the Google Summer of Code program since 2007 (first as a student, and later as a mentor) as part of the KDE project. I still maintain close ties to KDE, and work on several related projects such as Avogadro, CMake and VTK. VTK has Qt integration, and ParaView builds on both VTK and Qt for the visualization of large scientific data sets.

If you are a student, and would like to work on an exciting open source project, processing and visualizing some of the largest scientific data sets in the world, take a look at the Visualization Toolkit. There are a wide range of ideas, and if you have an idea you think would fit then please feel free to discuss it with me. I will let you know if it would be a good fit, and whether we have available mentors for the proposed project. We have mentors available who are experts in visualization, large data, parallel algorithms and related technologies. The core of VTK is written in portable C++, with new changes being tested daily. Our API is automatically wrapped in Python, TCL and Java.

I am very excited about VTK's first year in the Google Summer of Code, this represents a unique way for students to get involved in a large, well tested open source project. We have started using Gerrit for code review, and you can view build and test results on many platforms for VTK both continuously and nightly. We have a well established software process which will serve you well in any project where software quality is important, with nearly 1400 unit and regression tests. This is a large, collaborative project with more than 100 contributors last year (as measured by Ohloh).

Volume Rendering in Avogadro

marcus@cryos.net (Marcus D. Hanwell) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 22:23:43 -0500

Since joining Kitware I have had limited spare time to work on Avogadro, and for various reasons my spare time has been more limited than usual too. Since the new year I have been able to start spending more time working on Avogadro, and open source chemistry in general, thanks to an SBIR phase I proposal that was funded last year with the US Army Corps of Engineers. This is exciting for a number of reasons, including the fact that I have the opportunity to prototype exciting new features for chemistry visualization, workflow and data management.

One of the new bits of work I have been doing is to use some of the advanced visualization techniques in VTK such as GPU accelerated volume rendering. Now the code is still pretty rough, and is more a proof of concept. I wrote a simple external Avogadro extension that links to and uses VTK to render the first volume found in the current Avogadro molecule. All of the parameters are currently fixed, I am hoping to get the time to add in more options along with some integration of the Avogadro rendered molecule in the VTK render window. You can view the code here, please bear in mind it is at a very early stage.

I have also been working on several other things such as splitting out the quantum calculation code from the Avogadro plugins, and putting it in a small library. I have called the library OpenQube, right now it only has the base functionality that was in Avogadro but I will be extending it with more features, regression tests and I am hoping due to the decoupled nature and liberal BSD license it will encourage wider collaboration in this field.

There is also the Quixote project which I am very excited about. Meaningfully storing the results of quantum calculations, annotating them and retrieving them within an open framework. This is a growing problem in todays world, and I am working on extensions to Avogadro to allow it to fully exploit the semantic chemical web. This includes some of the previous work to access the PDB and other public resources as well as private databases within groups and organizations.

I think this is going to be a very exciting year for Avogadro, and open source chemistry in general.