Welcome to 2010 SCILAB Open Source Software Contest!
2010 Scilab Open Source Software Contest will be held in September 24-26, 2010, Ningxia University, Yinchuan city, Ningxia, China.
Background: SCILAB is the famous open source software for scientific computing. Originally created by INRIA, the Scilab Consortium has joint in July 2008 the Digiteo Foundation, first world-class research in the France area, dedicated to Information Science and Technology. Since more than a decade, SCILAB has been extensively received by scientists, engineers, technicians and practitioners in both academia and industry. It has been recognized as the best substitute for commercial software like Matlab, Xmath and Matrix, and is being distributed currently at the speed of 50,000 copies per month in all over the world.
SCILAB has brought us not only powerful functions in scientific computing, but also its free spirit of open source. At present, the Scilab Consortium Research and Development Team is devoted to developing and promoting the open source software to the world, particularly in China. The free spirit of open source software and technology makes far-reaching sense to China's software industry in terms of liberalization from the international Commercial software companies. Therefore, research institutes and governmental sessions concerned in China and France have co-developed and been supporting SCILAB activities in China. From this point of view, SCILAB promotion in China has set up a broad bridge between the researchers in China and in France, and it provides the opportunities for Chinese researchers, engineers and students to study and express their talent by means of competition and communication with Chinese and French industrial partners. Since 2002, the SCILAB competition has been arranged in China once a year under the auspices of LIAMA, SCILAB university partners, and INRIA in France. The eight annual events were held in Shanghai, Xi'an, Xiamen, Wuhan, Hangzhou, foshan,Liuzhou and Guiyang respectively.
Competition Purposes:
(1) To gain programming skill and talent on Scilab.
(2) To develop novel teaching and research results through software.
(3) To enhance the cooperation nationally and internationally.
(4) To advocate scientific spirits of "freedom, sharing and innovation".
Rules of Contest :
Eligibility: Academic staff and students of university and research institute, engineers of industrial and business organizations, and all other professionals.
Requirement of Contest Works:
(1) Contest works should be based on free SCILAB toolboxes. Please refer to the latest toolboxes and source codes released;
(2) Contestants may select any topic for their work. The work should include demonstrations, examples, online assistants and documents.
(3) Demonstration program is to be written in SCILAB and other language, for example, FORTRAN, C++, Java, and so on. Toolbox should run on SCILAB 4.1.2 or higher.
Requirement of Contest Works: For each toolbox the contestant has to give:
(1) One page in English with the name of the toolbox, the authors and their affiliation, and a brief description of the toolbox.
(2) A paper in English which describes the requirements for using the toolbox such as the operating system (Windows, Linux…), the compilers (C, C++…), the libraries (JAVA…), Scilab version and other relevant information if needed, together with a small user’s guide which explains how to install the toolbox with Scilab.
Important Technical points: The purpose of following technical points is that your toolbox can e used by other people using Scilab. After the requirements for using the toolbox are fulfilled, the user must be able to use the toolbox with his standard Scilab version. This is an important point because then your toolbox can be put on Scilab Web site and so be easily available for all Scilab community.
(1) The Scilab distribution that must be used for the contest is the official stable version 4.1.2. It can be downloaded from Scilab Web site www.scilab.org or other mirror sites.
(2) The toolbox will be given as a compressed file using standard file compressor such as zip or gzip. The compressed file must only include the toolbox and possibly all what is necessary to use it (such as additional libraries for instance): the toolbox must work with standard Scilab versions already installed.
(3) The toolbox must include on-line help files describing its purpose and the on-line help of each user callable Scilab function if any. The help files must be written using the standard XML language using Scilab DTD.
(4) A demonstration of the toolbox, using for instance Scilab “demo” files, will be appreciated.
(5) For building and loading toolboxes into Scilab, standard “builder.sce” and “loader.sce” files can be defined using the “get_absolute_file_path”, “genlib”, “ilib_build”, etc… Scilab functions. These functions allow, in most cases, to create system independent “loader.sce” and “builder.sce” files.
Award Selection: The Award Selection process includes three stages:
(1) Shortlist of entries by an Expert Team.
(2) Peer-evaluation on the Internet, and.
(3) Final selection by French and Chinese Scientists.
In the first stage, 22 works will be shortlisted from all the received submissions. Peer-evaluation
on the Internet will be made by all contestants. Finally, the French and Chinese Scientist Team will decide on the awards to be given, taking into consideration the results of the first and second stages.
Prizes:
(1) First prize : 2 awards (one student + one supervisor/award trip to Scilab Consortium, France for one week; one student/award visiting LIAMA for two months).
(2) Second prize : 10 awards (1,000Yuan/ award)
(3) Third prize : 10 awards (500Yuan/ award)
Official Language:
The official language will be English.
