[mlpack] Hello Everyone

[Vivek Pal]

I am Vivek Pal, a senior year undergraduate student with major in Computer
Science at Delhi Technological University in New Delhi, India. I'm looking
forward to be a part of mlpack in GSoC 2017 and beyond. I'm just getting
started afresh with mlpack, although I've used it for some hackish ML
experiments in the past.

I do have some experience with ML through some academic projects that I've
done over the past 1-2 years ranging from building a recommender system to
working on sentiment analysis of tweets etc. and thus, I have developed
strong interests in ML. However, I hope being an ML practitioner or expert
is not a primary requirement for a GSoC student in mlpack. :)

Also, last semester I took a course that was entirely based on NNs and it
got me really interested into this subset of machine learning. I was able
to publish an article based on single layer neural net intended for
beginners here: http://www.geeksforgeeks.org/implementing-ann-training-
process-in-python/

Since this year's project ideas are not out yet, I have looked up previous
year ideas and find two interesting and feel confident enough to work on
(if they're planned to be continued this year):

1. Alternatives to neighborhood-based collaborative filtering
2. Essential Deep Learning Modules

I'd appreciate advice based on these project ideas to help me explore more
about these and be able to finally make sound decision of choosing between
two.

I've already started to familiarise myself with the related codebase and
will find some warm up tasks right away from issues list. However, it'd be
great if I could get some pointers for going ahead that would help me
understand codebase and tests better.

I should probably also mention that I was a part of GSoC last year. I
worked with Xapian which is a probabilistic search engine library written
in C++. Broadly, my work was focused on improving the existing weighting
schemes in Xapian which basically started with reading a bunch of research
papers. I was able to successfully complete all the set out goals of the
project and the work product was merged in the Xapian codebase.

Thanks and Regards,
Vivek Pal
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