I was quite surprised this afternoon to see a story on Slashdot announcing that a group at ARL:UT (Applied Research Labs : University of Texas) had open sourced GPSTk, “a cross platform library and set of applications that provides both fundamental and advanced GPS processing algorithms”. I worked at ARL:UT for five years while I was living in Austin, but I didn’t happen to work with this group of researchers and engineers.
This group was, and presumably still is, in the south building. At the time I was there, they were doing a lot of satellite work, which entailed lots of GPS research and development.
I worked in the north building, which was mostly occupied by scientists and engineers doing acoustics research & development. I was in the Advanced Sonar Division, doing underwater acoustics research and designing software for sonars for submarines. Ah, the memories of writing code in Occam to run on transputers.
It’s very cool to see ARL:UT getting some attention. I really loved it there and I still have a lot of friends working there.