[mlpack] interested in GSoC

[Manos Stergiadis]

 Hello everyone.

My name is Manos Stergiadis and I am a post-master trainee in Data Science
with a background in software engineering and machine learning. I found two
of the project ideas very interesting as well as relevant to my current
work.

I am specifically interested in:

*1.  String Processing Utilies.*

I am currently contirbuting to an popular NLP framework called gensim
<https://github.com/steremma/gensim>. In fact the main feature of the
latest release was developed by myself and had to do with parsing raw
wikipedia xml. A lot of my contributions in this project have to do with
transforming text into numerical vectors in order to use it as input to
sklearn style machine learning algorithms. The ways to do that range from
simple ones (OHE which was mentioned in the project idea but also BOW or
n-gram representations) to more complex ones (word2vec variations
development by Tomas Mikolov over the period 2011-2013). Even though my
work has been in Python I also have some background (and past open source
contributions like this <https://github.com/steremma/stdr_simulator> one)
in C++ and I am eager to improve on it.


*2.  Essential Deep Learning Modules*

I would be very interested in implementing one of the proposed modules
(perhaps a BRNN) because I have recently started working through relevant
courses on Coursera and reading the milestone papers in RNNs and LSTMs. I
find them extremely interesting. I also have some related experience as in
2011 I wrote a neural network from scratch in C and parallelized it in CUDA
(there were no libraries that I knew of back then). The code - which is
quite ugly since I was a bachelor student back then - can be found here
<https://github.com/steremma/digitRecognition>.

If my profile seems interesting I would love to have a discussion on next
steps like preparing a detailed project plan for one of these project or
addressing a specific issue with a PR. I would also like to discuss the
time commitment requirements as part of the GSoC period will overlap with
my current position's responsibilities.

With kind regards,
Manos Stergiadis
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