[mlpack] GSOC 2016 Aspirant - Parallel Stochastic Optimisation Methods

[Aditya Sharma]

Hello,

I'm Aditya Sharma, a senior at Birla Institute of Technology and Science,
Pilani, India (BITS Pilani) in the final year of my Bachelor's degree in
Electrical and Electronics Engineering and I graduate in August 2016.

This semester, I'm doing my undergraduate thesis under Dr Partha Talukdar
<http://talukdar.net>, with whom I had also interned last summer, at
the Machine
and Language Learning (MALL) Lab <http://www.talukdar.net/mall-lab/> of the
Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.

My research here is focused on implementing distributed optimisation
algorithms for large scale machine learning on the Cray XC40 supercomputer
- SahasraT
<http://www.serc.iisc.ernet.in/facilities/ComputingFacilities/systems/newhpc/>,
currently the fastest in India, using C++ based MPI-OpenMP. I'm currently
developing an asynchronous parallel version of SGD along the lines of DownPour
SGD
<http://papers.nips.cc/paper/4687-large-scale-distributed-deep-networks.pdf>,
having already implemented a synchronous version using MPI_AllReduce, as a
baseline. For the same, I have developed a Parameter Server infrastructure
on Cray XC40 from scratch in MPI.

Along with my lab, I also participated in the 'Allen AI Science Challenge
<https://www.kaggle.com/c/the-allen-ai-science-challenge>' hosted at
Kaggle, which aimed at answering 8th grade multiple choice science
questions. We achieved an overall accuracy of 51.2%, and stood *10th* on
the leaderboard
<https://www.kaggle.com/c/the-allen-ai-science-challenge/leaderboard/private>.
(You can see my Kaggle profile here <https://www.kaggle.com/amberosti>.)

Owing to my experience in the area, I am really interested in the '
<https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas#parallel-stochastic-optimization-methods>Parallel
stochastic optimisation methods'
<https://github.com/mlpack/mlpack/wiki/SummerOfCodeIdeas#parallel-stochastic-optimization-methods>
project
idea listed on the GSOC 2016 page of mlpack and would love to know more
details regarding the direction in which the community wants to go with
regards to this project.

In case you are interested to know more details about my work, you can
glance over my webspace <http://adityasharma.space/> and my CV
<http://adityasharma.space/files/Aditya-CV-2016.pdf>.

Thank you for your time!

Warm Regards,
Aditya

-- 

Aditya Sharma
Fourth Year Undergraduate
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering,
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani
Rajasthan, India - 333031

WWW: http://adityasharma.space​

E-mail: adisharma075 at gmail.com, f2012075 at pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adityabits
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