You are here: Home » HFOSS Summer Institute
Print this page

Undergraduate Internship Opportunities

[Update: Information about the Summer 2010 Program now available]

The Humanitarian FOSS (H-FOSS) Project offers summer internships for undergraduate computing students, currently enrolled in American (US) academic institutions, who want to get involved in building free and open source software for use by humanitarian organizations.

Concurrent H-FOSS Institutes will be held at Trinity College in Hartford, CT, Wesleyan University in Middletown CT, and Connecticut College in New London CT, with teams working and housed at each location. The 10-week (Last week of May to beginning of August) Institute will engage students in a number of local and international open source projects. The internships come with a $4000 stipend and include on-campus housing for the duration.

Institute participants will learn the fundamentals of FOSS development by contributing to open-source projects, and typically work in teams of 2-3 with mentoring by advisers from the open source community and mentors from Accenture Corporation along side faculty supervisors on the following projects:

  • The Sahana system is a FOSS disaster management system built initially by Sri Lankan IT professionals in the aftermath of the 2004 Asian tsunami. Contributing since 2006 previous H-FOSS participants built a volunteer management module and contributed other code to the Sahana system. During the 2008 earthquake in China, students worked with IBM and Sahana software engineers to support Sahana's successful deployment in Chengdu province (Blog Posting). Code written by HFOSS students for the Sahana project is now being used by New York City's Office of Emergency Management as part of its coastal flood disaster preparedness system.

  • The Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS) is a free and open medical record system being used to assist health workers in the treatment of AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria in the developing world. Begun by the Regenstrief Institute and Partners in Health, OpenMRS has been deployed in Rwanda, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, and other African countries. Since 2007 summer internship students have made several significant contributions to the OpenMRS system, including a Touchscreen module, a module to upload and edit X-rays and other medical images, and modifications to the system's underlying data structures.

  • Innovative Support to Emergencies, Diseases and Disasters [or InSTEDD], is an organization that seeks to bring technologies together in an attempt to help in the early detection of various diseases and disasters. Where necessary technologies do not exist, InSTEDD works to create the technologies, sharing them with the public when they are stable and usable.  In Summer 2009 H-FOSS participants contributed to ongoing Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence project EVOLVE to develop an automated system to assist in detecting disease outbreak patterns.

  • GNOME offers an easy to understand desktop for your GNU/Linux or UNIX computer. This is a  new project coming Summer 2009, participants will working on improving GNOME Accessibility issues. In GNOME, accessibility is a core value that touches all aspects of the system. With a model of "built in" versus "bolted on", the GNOME Accessibility project has helped lead the industry in accessible design. From the infrastructure, to the graphical toolkit, to the applications, to the assistive technologies, accessibility has been a central consideration from the very early days. GNOME Accessiblity project tools are primiarly written in C and Python.

  • POSIT is a mobile application developed on Google Android phone platform to assist emergency works and field researchers. POSIT was conceived in Spring 2008, with ongoing development this summer. The POSIT team was awarded 16 Android development phones by Google for the project. POSIT project code base is in Java, utilizing the Android APK.

  • Collabbit is a project introduced in the Summer of 2009, developed by a team of H-FOSS participants, as a web-based communication tool to help coordinate and organize relief efforts in times of disaster and recovery.  Collabbit was recently used by the New York City Salvation Army to coordinate a mass feeding of 10'000 people over Thanksgiving in the city (Blog Posting). The application is written in Ruby on Rails platform.

  • Xpilot-Ed is a learning system being developed intended to help students learn programming and experience problem solving in a real-time video game environment. Xpilot-AI was developed as a means for researchers in artificial intelligence to test methods of the generating autonomous controllers. . Xpilot-Ed will be developed to be an effective system for learning programming.  In further work on this project, a web site and learning tutorial will be developed to allow students to learn programming in high schools where no computer science teacher is available. Xpilot is a multi-player, 2-dimensional, space flight combat game written in the C programming language.

  • The Tor Project is free software and an open network that helps you defend against
    a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security known as traffic analysis. The following is a list of potential projects you might work on (click here). You will require or aquire skills in Programming in C, C command line tools like Makefiles, GNU configure scripts, etc and Basic network programming.

 

 

 

 

 

New projects are always in the works. Participants are encouraged to think outside the box and if they have ideas that they would like to explore over the summer, we are happy to accommodate them.

Click Here for application details

Sampling of Internship testimonials:

“All the development teams projected a warm home-like feeling, and learning from others really brought a new perspective to the field of Computer Science for me”

“We all learned the basics of a flow of development, but at a much faster pace.  To actually work on a project that was going to be used in the real world was quite motivating and inspiring, creating an experience I had not found anywhere else”

“The best part was how well we all got along and the flexibility of working hours. I'm satisfied with the work we did. For a first shot at a ‘real’ application, I think we did a pretty OK job”

“Because my main goal in life is to help disadvantaged persons, and I was curious at how software development can factor into that dream”

“Open source development allows for experience that can usually only be gained in the industry, and this experience is hard to come by as an undergrad”

"I've already learned more than I could've ever imagined”

 

For more information, contact Trishan De Lanerolle (trishan.delanerolle@trincoll.edu) or Ralph Morelli (ralph.morelli@trincoll.edu).

General Inquires : internship@hfoss.org
Telephone: +1.860.297.5313

 


^ Top

Previous page: Financial Sponsors
Next page: How to apply