User:RHochberg

Robert Hochberg teaches at the University of Dallas, and directs the computer science program there.

My research area is computational mathematics --- developing algorithms and theory to solve problems. My latest two papers:

• Discrepancy One among Homogeneous Arithmetic Progressions
• The Gap Number of the T-Tetromino

are typical of the type of research that I've been doing lately.

Regarding teaching, what I most want for my students is for them to be able to think and reason logically in order to be excellent problem solvers, assisted by computer technology. Whether it's a computer vision or operating systems class, my focus is on the underlying principles rather than any particular technology. Technologies come and go, but design principles that are good now will be good for a long time.

The University of Dallas is a small, private liberal arts school with about 1300 undergraduate students. Our CS major is in its 5th year. Our school has a large Core Curriculum that all students must take, which leaves not too much room for computer science classes.

This creates an interesting difficulty: We have no room to require all students to take courses such as Software Engineering, Databases or Networking. Instead, we have used projects such as High Performance Computing and Computer Vision as a vehicle to introduce these ideas. HFOSS, in particular the MouseTrap project, will be another way to supplement our students' learning. But more than just being another way, it is probably going to be a better way. Our school tends to attract students who want to make the world a better place.

Guided Tour of Sugar Labs

Roles for My Students	Probably developer, since my students are mostly CS students. There might be some designers among them.
Bug Tracking	Bugs come in two types: defect and enhancement. They seem to go through a process of being new, assigned and accepted by a developer. They also have normal or high priority. Clicking on the bug text reveals So Much information about the bug.
Last commit	March 10, 2014.
Schedule	Each release comports with the previous roadmap description, and the new roadmap sets concrete goals for the next release.

Guided Tour of the Sahana Eden Project

Contributors	The description here of the ways to contribute is much more developer-centered. At Sugar Labs, they described higher-level categories of participation (educator, evangelist, programmer...) whereas here at Sahana, it seems to be mostly hardcore developers, designers and testers that they want. An exception is Outreach, which could draw on the talents of artists and communicators.
Bug Tracker	This projects bug system seems much more sophisticated than Sugar Labs'. There are 37 categories of bugs, the first of which, Active Tickets, seems to correspond to the entirety of Sugar Labs' bug list. I get the impression this project is more widely used.
Roadmap	Seems to have stalled. It reflects a disciplined process to set and reach goals, with many closed tickets reflecting many hours of work. The questions presents itself: How do people find the hundreds of hours needed to do this stuff???

SourceForge Field Trip

Computer Vision	There were about 610 projects, 15 languages, with C/C++, Jave and PHP the top four.
Comparison	I compared OpenCV with AnimeVision. OpenCV has about 68000 weekly downloads, and AnimeVision seems to have died, and to be no longer active. Sorting by Popularity, OpenCV seems to be the most active.
OpenCV	Provides libraries in Python, C++ and Java for computer vision. Written in C++, with bindings for the other languages. Developers will use this, since it's just libraries. Last update, September 16, 2016.

OpenMRS on OpenHub

Facts

Mostly written in Java, with about 3.73 million lines of code. Contributor locations don't seem to load. Written in 15 languages, with Javascript the second most popular. Java has the highest comment ratio, and there were about 10 contributors, on average, over the past year. The top three contributors over the past 12 months have been involved for about 6, 5 and 3 years, resp. There have been an average of 443/12 commits per month, over the past 12 months.

Reflection

I've used GitHub and SourceForge on occasion. It's great to learn about OpenHub, a sort of overseer that will help me evaluate the activity and breadth of projects at a glance.

Project Evaluation Activity --- OpenMRS

Complexity	I would rate this a three. It seems to have an enormous codebase and very sophisticated architecture.
Activity	The project seems very active. SourceForge is down right now, but the GitHub repository reflects 8 pull requests (developer thing) the past month.
Community	The community is fantastically active.
On-ramp	There is ample help for folks who want to get involved. The list of "beginner" tickets is impressive, and the book for new developers is very thorough.
Suitability	The project is so huge, that I bet it would have appropriate activities, as far as knowledge and talent are concerned. I would really need to assess whether the students are 'interested' before bringing it into the classroom, though.