In this edition of our open source news roundup, we take a look at fighting cancer with open source machine learning, a new electric vehicle built via open source patents, open APIs at the NHS, and more.
Harnessing open source machine learning to fight cancer
Can open source help in the fight against cancer? A group of researchers at Georgia Tech thinks so. They've developed "a new program that predicts cancer drug effectiveness via machine learning and raw genetic data" and released the code as open source.
John MacDonald, head of Georgia Tech's Integrated Cancer Research Center, said that he and his team don't "want to hold the code or data for ourselves or make profits with this. We want to keep this wide open so it will spread." The software analyzes genetic data using machine learning algorithms. It can also "work with data from varying sources by making them compatible." You can learn more about the software in this paper at the Public Library of Science.
Building an electric car using Tesla's open source patents
In 2015, Tesla Motors famously open sourced the patents for their electric vehicles. While a small number of companies looked at using those patents, one Chinese startup has launched "a beta version of their first vehicle."
The Xpeng from Xiaopeng Motors is an all-electric SUV that uses a Tesla-inspired battery architecture that can power the car on a 186-mile (about 300 kilometer) journey. The car also includes "a Tesla-like center touchscreen as the main control center for the vehicle," and Xiaopeng Motors "plans similar autonomous and assisted driving features as Tesla's Autopilot."
Britain's NHS creating open APIs
Britain's National Health Service (NHS) is in the midst of a drive to "make it easier to share and access patient information for clinicians at the point of care," and a big part of that is the creation of an open API lab. The NHS will run the lab with INTEROPen, a community that develops open standards for health care.
The goal is to develop a "set of open source APIs that can be used by developers to create new apps and speed up integration between systems." The fruits of the lab will be "made available under a permissive open source license."
Europe moves to use more open source
For years now, governments in Europe have been on the forefront of adopting open source software. Recently, ministers from the European Union's member states took a step further to increasing their use of open source software by signing the Tallinn Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment.
The declaration calls on "public services to make their ICT solutions publicly available, and to encourage the private sector and civil society to reuse the software." A big part of that is to avoid the kind of vendor lock-in that comes with proprietary solutions. The ministers who signed the declaration also called on the European Commission to "consider strengthening the requirements for use of open source solutions and standards when the (re)building of ICT systems and solutions takes place with EU funding—including by an appropriate open license policy."
In other news
- GoPro's old but efficient CineForm codec goes open source
- Citizens wrestle source code from public agencies
- ROS open source robotics middleware turns 10
- How can academic software research become open source?
- Biomaker Fayre showcases 40 open source, low-cost biological instruments
Thanks, as always, to Opensource.com staff members and moderators for their help this week. Make sure to check out our event calendar to see what's happening next week in open source.
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