PRIZE. Netha Hussain, who will soon publicly defend her doctoral thesis at the Institute of Neuroscience and Physiology, is this year’s academic winner of the international Women in Open Source Award. She has been given the award for actively working for many years to improve Wikipedia’s content related to medicine.
“Winning the Women in Open Source Award means a lot to me. I will be even more happy if people, most importantly women, start contributing to Wikipedia,” says Netha Hussain in the video that Red Hat produced to publicize both of this year’s winners.
Netha Hussain was named the academic winner for the Women in Open Source Award, which is awarded by Red Hat. She received the award for her commitment to contributing to open source, particularly Wikipedia, and because she serves as an example for others in the field.
Available through open source
Later in May, Netha Hussain will defend her thesis on virtual reality-based technologies that can be used to assess the function of arms after a stroke. The software used in her thesis work, Curictus, is also available through open source, which means that its source code is public and available for anyone to use and change. As a researcher within kinematic analysis using virtual reality technology, she hopes to bridge the gap between technology and clinical practice through inexpensive and open source-based instruments for hospitals.
“I plan to keep working as a volunteer for Wikipedia and to focus on increasing the quality of images and content related to health and medical care,” explains Netha, who is currently working with texts about COVID-19.
Ten years with Wikipedia
She began contributing to Wikipedia in 2010, when she had just begun to study medicine.
“The idea to build an encyclopedia based on collaboration where anyone can contribute fascinated me. I began editing and contributing new articles related to health and medical care and later discovered several communities dealing with the philosophy behind open source.”
Since then, there have been many articles in journals, blog posts, subtitles for videos, contributions to maps, programming and paintings, all freely available online.
Language manager for TED Talks
On Wikipedia, she writes articles about women, care and health, both in English and Malayalam, a language that is spoken by over 35 million people, primarily in the Indian state of Kerala. Netha is also the Malayalam language manager for TED Talks, where she creates subtitles in the language. She also has contributed lots of data to Wikidata and thousands of images to Wikimedia Commons.
The Women in Open Source Award is given annually to two winners, one academic and one community. It is awarded by Red Hat, a leading company for open source solutions. Red Hat introduced one of the first distributions of the Linux operative system.
- You can read more about the award here: https://www.redhat.com/en/about/women-in-open-source
- Watch the video from Red Hat with both winners for 2020, Netha Hussain and Megan Byrd-Sanicki:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFV_LPbSfM
- Netha Hussain’s doctoral thesis Virtual Reality Based Kinematics for Assessment of Post-stroke Upper Limb Function is available here:https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/63288
TEXT: ELIN LINDSTRÖM
