Last weekend I was part of the first UK Science Hack Day. Strangely it lasts a whole weekend, but the 'day' aspect refers to a 24 hour hack session. We were hosted by The Guardian newspaper in London (where many people also ended up sleeping there too!). The interesting aspect of the weekend was undoubtably the people; science academics who were keen on coding mixed with computer coders who were keen on science to work on joint projects.
Several people gave very short talk introducing themselves, the ideas they had for hacks, and frameworks they thought would be useful for others to use. Then the 24 hours of continuous hacking began, continuing through the night and into the next morning. The only break was for sustanence (beer and pizza) and to watch Doctor Who. I flitted between many different projects, and contributed to 3 in particular:
- Co-author cloud - it extracts all your co-authors from ArXiv.org and makes a rotating 3D cloud. People's names are bigger according to how much you've collaborated. Click on a name and it shows you all the papers you've been on together
- Seti.fm - Listen to SETI signals on our special radio station (still being hacked)
- Scilapse video - Lots of time lapse videos Carolina Oedman made. Jointly with myself and Amanda Bauer, we spell out 'Science Hack Day'. I provided the visual effects and some editing.
Other excellent science projects that were hacked together this weekend were:
- Random Orbit - View the International Space Station and other satellites on a Google Map in real time. They also provide RESTful webservices for satellite tracking, and a Jabber client to allow you to Instant Message satellites to find out where they are above at any time.
- Open Dirt Map - Where you can get your hands dirty and upload the quality and type of soil in your area and see your results on a Google Map. They also hope to fold into that the geological information for the area.
- For academics, both Mendeley and Scopus were making their new APIs available for people to use and query science publication databases and author profiles
- The Aurorascope was wired up this weekend to, which was a ball (to first order approximation, it was actually a semented frame covered in tissue paper) with LEDs inside that lit up according to where the aurora was last see.
Mental note: Next year we need an LCOGT API for people to use in exciting hacks!
