User:Eric Myers

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I am a physicist, currently working under contract with the LIGO laboratory to develop software for a project to make LIGO environmental data available to high school students and their teachers to support inquiry-driven investigtions (called "e-Labs") for a project called "Interactions in Understanding the Universe" (I2U2). This is one part of a confederation of similar projects, coordinated by the Education and Outreach office at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) which aims to leverage Grid-based research technologies in support of improving science education. The general ideas behind investigative "e-Labs" is based on the very successful QuarkNet project created by Fermilab.

Before working on I2U2 I was part of the team that set up Einstein@Home, a BOINC project which allows people to donate the spare cycles on their PC or Mac to search for evidence of gravitational waves, all while displaying a nifty screensaver.

My interest in MediaWiki comes from the fact that our e-Labs need a supporting glossary, and it seems reasonable to try to use a wiki for this. It also seems reasonable to expect that there are considerable advantages to using the same software, conventions and style guidelines used by the Wikipedia and sister projects. The best way to convince my collaborators of this is by setting up a demonstration.

To prepare for the design, development and deployment of Einstein@Home I had previously set up another BOINC project for testing, called Pirates@Home. I have recently added a MediaWiki glossary to Pirates@Home and will use it as a test-bed for single sign-on between the BOINC and wiki components.

Based on my experience working with BOINC I have already set up a prototype web portal for I2U2 which uses the BOINC code for discussion forums, and I have also used the authentication mechanism for the BOINC web site to manage authentication for the software analsysis tool I am developing for the LIGO e-Labs. I would like to find a way to make the wiki a part of this site without requiring additional authentication just to use (or at least to edit) the glossary. I've been investigating the Authentication plug-in in AuthPlugin.php, and the "magic" automatic authentication mechanisms in SSLAuthPlugin.php and ShibAuthPlugin.php. From these I've written BOINCAuthPlugin.php which now seems to work but needs more extensive testing.

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