Following in Galileo’s footsteps

Many of us spend the summer lounging on Europe’s beaches and use the Internet to plan our vacation and satellite navigation to get there. This summer, hundreds of ambitious students are spending their vacation in a different way - improving their computer programming skills with Google’s Summer of Code. Among them is Italy’s Mara Branzanti, a 26-year old PhD student in geomatics at the University of Rome’s La Sapienza. She’s working to, among other goals, improve your holidays.

Her project, financed by Google, is to write software that will make it quicker and easier to use the European Union’s Galileo global navigation satellite system. The EUR 5 billion Galileo programme being built by the European Union and European Space Agency is named after the Italian astronomer Galileo. It aims to provide a high-precision positioning system upon which European nations can rely, independent of competing Russian and U.S. systems.

Mara Branzanti in EconomyUp.it

Branzanti is helping write open source source software that will enable satellite receivers back on earth to better identify and connect with Gallileo satellites in orbit. Her work is part of a larger software effort under the leadership of Javier Arribas at the non-profit Catalonian research foundation Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya. Currently, the software in Gallileo receivers is only designed to 'see' the satellites that are already in orbit, and needs to be adapted so it can discover new satellites as they are launched. Branzanti’s code will make it easy to find the nearest orbiting Galileo signal, even from the most remote of locations. The European Commission recently praised her contributions.

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. We work with many open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together nearly 6,000 successful student participants and over 3000 mentors from over 100 countries worldwide, all for the love of code. To learn more about the program, read our 2013 Frequently Asked Questions page.

Meanwhile, enjoy your holidays and let’s thank Mara and other summer coders for developing technology that improves them.  Mara gave up a planned trip to New York to stay at home and code. though she will take a week this month on the beach in Sardinia. “But I’m  taking my computer,” she promises. “I need to finish by September.”

Posted by Marco Pancini, Public Policy Senior Counsel, Brussels