About Us

Open Source Software Lab

The IST Open Source Software Lab was initiated as a start-up grant proposal by its founder – Dr. Mathias Fonkam – as part of his hiring package. It was funded by the then Dean of IST – Dr. Andrew Sears starting Fall 2023 for whom we owe much gratitude.

Dr. Carl Cortner was the first faculty colleague to partner with Dr. Fonkam, not just to secure a physical location for the lab, but also to brainstorm on some of the focus areas of interest. Dr. Cortner was instrumental in securing a work area for the lab from then Acting Dean Tapia in the Summer of 2023. We are grateful for the support from Dean Tapia.

In the Fall of 2023, Mr. Jeff Schulman joined us as a faculty mentor for the lab. We officially started the lab activities Fall 2023 recruiting about 20 students, setting up a Canvas Site for the Lab, organizing about 4 meetings with the mentors and students that semester. The Canvas Site served as a platform for communications, collaborations and sharing of important open-source content with the group, especially the student interest group that we formed within the lab that semester.

Now, in 2024 we are also launching this website to be an additional source of collaboration and information for students interested in Open Source software.

Our vision is to position PSU as a world renowned and global leader on Open-Source Software developments ensuring the sustainability & growth of the Open-Source Software community.

Our mission is to get our students, faculty and community committed to adopting open-source software, building and disseminating critical capacity in open-source through trainings & research and forging greater collaborations with industry, government support agencies and other institutions.

The Goals for the Open Source Software Lab can best be summarized as the following:

  1. We are committed to Building a sustainable open Source community.
  2. Supporting and promoting the use of Open-source systems in teaching, research and administrative functions across Penn State Departments.
  3. Building in-house capacity on major open-source software systems such as Linux, NoSQL Databases, Machine Learning and Large Language Models.
  4. Mentoring our students to build industry-level skills on major open-source software systems, to become active contributors to the maintenance of these systems.
  5. To Contribute to the teaching and research of Open Source software systems.

We currently have the following areas of focus within the OSS Lab:

  1. Linux
  2. PostgreSQL
  3. NoSQL DBs – MongoDB & Neo4J
  4. Web-Development with JavaScript, Python, Ruby, and Haskell Web Frameworks
  5. DevOps
  6. LLM, ML, Data Science & System Dynamics Modeling with Vensim
  7. Functional Programming with Haskell
  8. Problem-Modeling and Analysis using Abstract Math, Neural Networks & System Dynamics
  9. Crypto-Economics

The work Groups within the Open Source Software Lab are currently as follows:

  1. OSSIG – The Open-Source Software Interest Group composed of students
  2. Lab Faculty mentors
  3. Other Penn State Partners