[mlpack] GSoC '16: Introduction and Project ideas discussion

[Vivek Pal]

Hello,

I hope your day is going well! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is
Vivek Pal. I'm an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science Engineering at
Delhi Technological University in New Delhi, India. I have been taking up
number of courses on Machine Learning from various MOOC platform like
MITx, Coursera,
Edx and Udacity. Also, I have more than 4 years of coding experience in
C++, C and python. I took my first course on Computer Science in high
school and started writing working programs in C++ since then.

I have keen interests in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. I
have read atleast half a dozen research papers related to different
algorithms, implementation models and framework over the period of last 5-6
months. I also started contributing to different projects like OpenCog
recently. However, those were minor contributions. Here's my Github profile
link for reference: https://github.com/ivmarkp . I intend to contribute in
MLPack project via GsoC '16. I have been lurking around in IRC channel to
gain an insight into the code of conduct for past few days and have also
followed previous mailing list mails. I have moderate-difficulty level
experience in working on recommender systems as I had built a recommender
system for the Minor project in college by taking cues from this research
paper: A Graph-based model for context-aware recommendation using implicit
feedback data. Here's the link for this paper:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11280-014-0307-z

After checking out proposed project ideas, I am quite interested in working
on these projects:

1. Alternatives to neighborhood-based collaborative filtering

2. Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search

Regarding the first project idea, I'm currently reading the paper
referenced as an alternative to k-NN for recommender selection. Would
revert back if I require more clarification. Also, if the issue #406 is
taken up by someone else what else can be done on my part to get involved
deeper into the project. And regarding the second project, no relevant
issues are mentioned yet. How can I proceed further on working on this
project? I think I could use some appropriate directions that can help me
get seriously involved into the projects. I kind of feel lost even though
I'm trying to take up open issues from Github but most of them are already
taken up and it wouldn't make sense to duplicate the work already done. I
apologize for starting off a little late but I've been quite busy with
coursework in college last week. Though, it seems next week is going to be
much more relaxed as per the planned schedule so expect me to be available
all the time. Also, I was wondering that is it possible that these projects
are already assigned to other students already on the account of their
prior contributions?

One thing I want to make a point on is the EXTENSIVE and VERY HELPFUL
guidelines for anyone who wants to get invoved in this project. I was able
to build and install Mlpack easily on my system. Thanks so much for putting
together this documentation. I'm basically done with all the guidelines and
starting points given on this page: http://www.mlpack.org/involved.html,


Thanks,

Vivek Pal

B.Tech, CSE

Delhi Technological University

New Delhi, India
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.cc.gatech.edu/pipermail/mlpack/attachments/20160305/46539698/attachment-0002.html>