Tag Archives: profiles

From Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 3)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Check out the first and second posts in the series.

This blog post marks the end of our short series following our adventures in open source. As you may recall, it all started thanks to Google Summer of Code (GSoC) which brought our team together. The GSoC collaboration spurred us to start a class Technical University of Munich (TUM) that eventually took on the Game of Thrones data science project and became an international sensation.

The success of our Game of Thrones project opened a lot of doors which is what we discuss in this post. First, we were invited to participate in the Morpheus Cup which is a prestigious university olympiad that brings together students from all over Europe to compete in digital challenges.

Our team rocked the competition winning two challenges and making it to the finalist stage in the third challenge. We were honored to represent our university and grateful for Google’s sponsorship of our team.
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The students and mentors of the Game of Thrones project at the Morpheus Cup challenge in May 2016. From left to right: Georgi Anastasov, Emiliyana Kalinova, Maximilian Bandle (all students), Guy Yachdav (mentor), Christian Dallago (mentor), Tobias Piffrader, Theodor Chesleran (both students) and Tatyana Goldberg (mentor).
Another opportunity that followed was an invitation to speak at a TEDx event at TUM on July 28th, 2016. In the event, titled “The Common Extraordinary,” Guy presented our work with data mining as bioinformaticians, sharing how we’ve made the field of data science accessible to our students and how we helped popularize it through the Game of Thrones project.

More speaking engagements are already scheduled: at meetups, coffee talks and conferences where we plan to keep evangelizing data mining and tell the story of our open source adventure.

What’s next? We’re excited to continue as mentors and org admins in GSoC and to carry on teaching data science and JavaScript at the university. A recent trade media report pointed out that the “out-of-the-box” thinking demonstrated in our course may revolutionize entire industries. In fact, we are currently signing up industry collaborators to work together on data mining projects.

It’s also extremely rewarding to see how our project resonated with so many people with diverse backgrounds and interests. Friends, family members, colleagues and even strangers ask us whether we can help them use data mining to answer questions on subjects ranging from politics, science, sports and even their personal lives.

Just the other day we were approached with the idea of developing an app that would take in a set of personality traits, process them along with social network data and help in suggesting life decisions: Should I date that person? Should I really take this job? Is Baltimore the city for me?

In the near future we dream of starting our own consultancy, as we already have requests from companies that want our help with upcoming data science projects. It seems our team has found its entrepreneurial bent!

We hope enjoyed this trilogy of blog posts, that our story has inspired you and that you too will continue to adventure in open source and collaborative development. If you’re not involved with Google Summer of Code, consider joining. It’s a great way to build up your project and share it with the world. More importantly, it lets you work with amazing people with whom, as we learned, it is possible to reach the sky.

By Tatyana Goldberg, Christian Dallago, and Guy Yachdav, BioJS

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 2)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg, Guy Yachdav and Christian Dallago and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project. Don’t miss the first post in the series. Heads up, this post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones seasons 5 and 6!

We built on the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) philosophy and the lessons we learned from participating in 2014 by starting a JavaScript Technology class at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).

We began with two dozen students who worked on expanding the BioJS visualization library. Our class became popular quickly and the number of applicants doubled each semester (nearly 180 applicants for 40 seats in the 2016 summer term).

In 2016 our team grew to include Christian Dallago, who had joined as a GSoC mentor. Together we decided to break with tradition of our course’s previous semesters. Instead of focusing on data visualization, we wanted to introduce students to data science with JavaScript. To get our students fully engaged, we decided the project would center on data from the hit TV show, Game of Thrones.

Our aim was to create an online portal for Game of Thrones fans which would:
  1. Provide the most comprehensive, structured and open data set about the Game of Thrones world accessible via API.
  2. Present an interactive map based on JavaScript.
  3. Listen to what people are saying on Twitter about each of the show’s characters.
  4. Use machine learning algorithms to predict the likelihood of each character’s death.
Our plan worked — the students were engaged. It was a beautiful sight to see: GitHub repos humming with activity as each dev team delved deeper into their projects. As a project manager, you know you’ve got something good when issues are being opened and closed at 4:00 AM!

The results were mind blowing. In 50 days of programming, 36 students opened over 1,200 issues and pull requests, pushed 3,300 commits, released four apps to NPM, and, of course, produced one absolutely amazing website.

The website amasses data from 2,028 characters. Our map shows 240 landmarks and the paths traveled by 28 characters. Our Twitter sentiment analysis tool analyzed over 3 million tweets. And we launched the first ever machine learning-based prediction algorithm that predicts the likelihood of dying for the 1,451 characters in the show that are still alive.

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Visualization of Twitter sentiment analysis data for Jon Snow during season 5 of Game of Thrones. The X axis shows the timeline and the Y axis shows the number of positive (green) and negative (red) tweets. Each tweet is analyzed by an algorithm using a neural network to determine whether the tweet’s writer has a positive, negative or neutral attitude toward the character. 
Since launch, the site’s popularity has skyrocketed. Following our press release, we were covered by over 1,500 media outlets, most notably Time, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Daily Mail, BBC, Reuters, The Telegraph, CNET and many more. HowStuffWorks, The Vulture and others produced videos about the site and Chris Hardwick’s Comedy Central show did a segment about us. We've also given countless interviews to TV, radio and newspapers.

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Google Analytics for the website. Left chart shows the number of visitors to the website during the first week after launch, reaching over 73K visitors on April 25th. Right chart shows the number of visitors at a given time point during the same week.
The most exciting part of the project was predicting the likelihood that any given character would die using machine learning. Machine learning algorithms find rules and patterns in the data, things that humans cannot obviously and simply detect. Once the rules and patterns are identified, we apply machine learning to make inferences or predictions from novel, previously unseen, data sets.

Warning: The next paragraphs contain spoilers for seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones!

In order to predict the likelihood of a character’s death, we collected information about all of the characters that appeared in books 1 to 5 and analyzed over 30 features, including age, gender, marital status and others. Then we used a support vector machine (SVM) to statistically compare the features of characters, both dead and alive, to predict who would get the axe next. Our prediction was correct for 74% of all cases and surprised us by placing a number of characters thought to be relatively safe in grave danger.

According to our predictions, Jon Snow, who was seemingly betrayed and murdered by fellow members of the Night’s Watch at the end of season 5, had only an 11% chance of dying. Indeed, Jon has risen from the dead in the second episode of season 6! We also predicted that the rulers of Dorn (Doran and Trystane) Martell are at a high likelihood of death and, as predicted, they were taken out in the first episode of the new season.

Of course, as is always the case with predictions, there were also misses. We didn’t expect Roose Bolton to be killed off nor did we see Hodor’s departure coming.

This experience was an amazing ride for our team and it all started with Google Summer of Code! In the next post we’ll share what followed and where we see ourselves heading in the future.

By Guy Yachdav, Tatyana Goldberg and Christian Dallago, BioJS

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich

From Google Summer of Code to Game of Thrones on the Back of a JavaScript Dragon (Part 1)

This guest post is a part of a short series about Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, instructors at Technical University of Munich, and the journey that was inspired by their participation as Google Summer of Code mentors for the BioJS project.

Hello there! We are from the BioJavaScript (BioJS) project which first joined Google Summer of Code (GSoC) in 2014. Our experience in the program set us on a grand open source adventure that we’ll be sharing with you in a series of blog posts. We hope you enjoy our story and, more importantly, hope it inspires you to pursue your own open source adventure.

Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, GSoC mentors and open source enthusiasts. Photo taken at the MorpheusCup competition Luxembourg, May 2016.
We came together around the BioJS community, an open source project for creating beautiful and interactive open source visualizations of biological data on the web. BioJS visualizations are made up of components which have a modular design. This modular design enables several things: they can be used by non-programmers, they can be combined to make more complex visualizations, and they can be easily integrated into existing web applications. Despite being a young community, BioJS already has traction in industry and academia.

In early 2014 we decided to apply for GSoC and we were fortunate to have our application accepted on our first try. The experience was extremely positive — the five students we accepted delivered great software and they had a big impact on the BioJS community:
  • The number of mailing list subscribers doubled in less than a month.
  • All five of our accepted students from 2014 became core developers.
  • Students were invited to six international conferences to share their work.
  • Students helped organize the first BioJS conference held July 2015.
  • Most importantly, the students have independently designed BioJS version 2.0 which positioned BioJS as the leading open source visualization library for biological data. 
You can see three examples of the work GSoC students did on BioJS below:


MSAViewer is a visualization and analysis of multiple sequence alignments and was developed by Sebastian Wilzbach. Proteome Viewer is a multilevel visualization of proteomes in the UniProt database and was developed by Jose Villaveces. Genetic Variation Viewer is visualization of the number and type of mutations at each position in a biological sequence and was developed by Saket Choudhary.

We learned a lot in the first year we participated in Google Summer of Code. Here are some of the takeaways that are especially relevant to mentors and organizations that are considering joining the program:
  1. GSoC is a great source of dedicated and enthusiastic young developers.
  2. Mentors need to carefully manage students, listen to them and let them lead initiatives when it makes sense.
  3. Org admins should leverage success in GSoC beyond the program.
  4. Orgs need to find the most motivated students and make sure their projects are feasible.
  5. People want to share in your success, so participation in GSoC can start a positive feedback loop attracting new contributors and users.
  6. Most importantly: the ideas behind GSoC - the love for open source and coding - are contagious and spread easily to larger audiences, especially to students and other people who work in academia. Just try it! 
Our positive experience spurred us to seek out and conquer new challenges. Stay tuned for our next post where we explain how GSoC inspired us to create a popular new class and how we applied data science to Game of Thrones.

By Tatyana Goldberg and Guy Yachdav, BioJS and TU Munich