[mlpack] mlpack - GSoC Introductions

[Marcus Edel]

Hello everyone,

It’s that time of year again! mlpack is once again participating in the Google
Summer of Code program. We have been allocated 8 student slots by Google this
year, and narrowing the about 100 proposals we received down to just 8 was a
very difficult task.

We look forward to working with these awesome folks and providing the students
with a summer of rewarding open source experience. We want to encourage them to
be lifelong advocates and contributors of the open-source community:

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

Nishant studies electronics (diodes and transistors), at the Indian Institute of
Technology, in India. He will be spending the summer working on extending the
Reinforcement Learning framework as well as push the visibility of the codebase
to a new level!

Fun fact: Nishant loves to go out on long drives, especially in the rain, ohh
and he can play the guitar. Maybe we can finally put a band together, the
mlpack’ers?

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

Kartik is a pre-final year student from Delhi Technological University, India.
He will implement object recognition algorithms like DarkNet as well as object
detection algorithms like YOLOv3, in addition, he plans to introduce a
command-line interface to various network models. Kartik already did some
awesome work in the community, we’re so excited that it’ll become official now!

Fun fact: Kartik likes to go running or trekking, ohh and he likes to watch
movies, especially animes. Maybe we should train a model to come up with a
script for a new anime?

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

Yashwant is an undergraduate at Jodhpur Institute of Engineering and Technology,
India. Yashwant will extend the bindings framework, by implementing R bindings,
he already wrote a working prototype and we are more than happy to provide an
updated version of mlpack to the R community.

Fun fact: Yashwant, likes cooking and might be the fittest member of the
community, hopefully, we can catch up while he is watching the last 207 episodes
of Supernatural.

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Himanshu Pathak, “Implementing Essential Deep Learning Module”, mentored by
Saksham

Himanshu studies computer science in India. Himanshu will extend the Neural
Network codebase, to be more specific he will implement Deep Belief Networks,
Radial Basis Function Networks, and Radial Basis Function Kernel over the
summer. We are really excited that Himanshu is going to build on and improve the
work from last year.

Fun fact: Himanshu likes to watch Attack on Titan and My Hero Academia, probably
two of the best anime series out there; In the question “What are the best
animes to watch?”, Attack on Titan is ranked 1st while My Hero Academia is
ranked 3rd.

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Anjishnu Mukherje,e Improvisation and Implementation of ANN Modules”, mentored
by Sreenik

Anjishnu is a CS undergrad from India. Anjishnu will improve the existing Neural
Network framework and he will also add new modules for the computer vision
community. You might have seen Anjishnu on GitHub, we are excited to have him on
board.

Fun fact: Anjishnu is a huge e-sports fan, even though he is probably good at
only a couple of games; Let’s see if he can beat mlpack’s Super Mario Kart
model, or Ryan our current Super Mario Kart champion.

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

Omar is a third year PhD student, in Palaiseau, France. Over the summer he will
try to get mlpack running on different resource constrained devices, like
Intel’s 80386. We all hoarded a lot of hardware over the years, and we are more
than excited to put some machine to use.

Fun fact: Omar likes to go hiking, swimming and he is also does some music;
another member of our own band, remember the mlpack’ers? Also Omar has a really
unique hobby, he likes to fly drones into trees.

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Mrityunjay Tripathi, “Transformer and BERT in mlpack”, mentored by Mikhail

Mrityunjay is a pre-final year undergrad Computer Science and Engineering
student from India. Mrityunjay will implement the Transformer model in mlpack
and on top, he will add the BERT pre-trained model which is built mainly using
the Transformer Encoder layer to mlpack. With BERT, mlpack will have a strong
state of the art language model ready to be used by the NLP community.

Fun fact: Mrityunjay likes to travel and trekking, one of his favorite place, is
Kedarnath, which is a beautiful mountain in the Gangotri Group of peaks in the
western Garhwal Himalaya.

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Jeffin Sam, “Vis Tool”, mentored by Toshal and Ryan B.

Jeffin is a CS student from India, he is a former GSoC student and this time he
will connect mlpack with the TensorBoard, which allows us to visualize our
machine learning methods and explore interesting aspects of the optimization
process.

Fun fact: Jeffin started to play and learn chess. We might have some methods we
could train on chess but not sure they are quite at the level Jeffin is.


Once again, congratulations to the selected students. We look forward to
participating with you on completing your project throughout the summer
holidays.

Thanks,
Marcus