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Google Summer Of Code Experience

Through the program, not only do the students get to learn about real-life software development scenarios, developing code under the guidance of world class mentor(s) provides to them an excellent learning opportunity. On the other hand, it helps expand the open source community, resulting in the development and release of more source code for the benefit of all. GSoC 2010, in its 6th year since its inception, was an excellent year for our college as 7 NSITians got selected into the program under multifarious organisations. One of them was Ekansh Preet Singh, a student of then IT 2nd year.

Ekansh worked for Expert Labs for their crowd sourcing project ThinkUp, the technology platform being used by the the White House to gather public responses in the Grand Challenges project. It aims to give policy makers the tools and techniques that enable them to use crowdsourcing to make better decisions.

Ekansh's project, Geo-Location Awareness and Visualizations project was all about capturing the location of people responding to tweets and status updates on various social networking websites and displaying them on a google map. In brief, the project basically aimed to :

• Collect geodata from Twitter, Facebook and the like.
• Reverse geoencode the location, accurate only to the nearest city, to display it on the map. This was required to maintain a user’s privacy.
• Export the data through a GeoRSS web service so that it can not only be used within ThinkUp, but allows the user to embed their streams into any GeoRSS map.
• Use the data collected in the above steps to dynamically generate a Google map within ThinkUp to give a visual presentation of the response generating places to a particular post and hence to filter the responses according to a specific location.

To read more about Ekansh's experience, you can read his interview on the Expert Labs blog here (http://expertlabs.org/2010/08/thinkup-contributor-spotlight-ekansh-preet.html).

Ekansh can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. if you require more information.