[mlpack] Projects accepted for GSoC 2020

[Ryan Curtin]

Hello everyone,

Today the accepted projects for mlpack were announced.  This year, we
received 8 slots out of our requested 10, so we unfortunately had to
make some hard decisions.  We received 89 proposals, and many were quite
competitive, so, as always, it isn't easy selecting which students
should be accepted.

Here are the 8 projects:

  - Nishant Kumar
     "Addition of Rainbow and Soft Actor-Critic to RL Codebase"
     mentored by Marcus and Rahul

  - Kartik Dutt
     "Application of ANN Algorithms Implemented in mlpack"
     mentored by Sangyeon and Saksham

  - Yashwant Singh
     "Automatically-Generated R Bindings"
     mentored by Ryan C., Dirk, and James

  - Himanshu Pathak
     "Implementing Essential Deep Learning Module"
     mentored by Saksham

  - Anjishnu Mukherjee
     "Improvisation and Implementation of ANN Modules"
     mentored by Sreenik

  - Omar Shrit
     "mlpack on RPi and other resource-constrained devices"
     mentored by Ryan C. and Roberto

  - Mrityunjay Tripathi
     "Transformer and BERT in mlpack"
     mentored by Mikhail

  - Jeffin Sam
     "Vis Tool"
     mentored by Toshal and Ryan B.

Congratulations to everyone who was accepted!  If you were not accepted,
but you feel that you put together a competitive proposal, you are
probably right---and we're sorry that we weren't able to make it work
out.

Thank you to everyone who has applied.  Many bugs were found, many
improvements were merged, and with all of our work combined we released
mlpack 3.1.1 and will continue to release more improvements in the
future.

I realize that there are lots of PRs that didn't get merged during the
application period; personally, I'll be trying to do some work through
the backlog as I'm able to.

The next month is community bonding---so students should make sure they
have regular communications with their mentors, get familiar with
coding/merging practices (if that hasn't happened already).  Feel free
to hang out in the chat and if there are any questions don't hesitate to
ask your mentor or anyone.

Have a great day!  (may the fourth be with you! :))

Thanks,

Ryan

-- 
Ryan Curtin    | "And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's
ryan at ratml.org | what you create." - Minister