Google Summer of Code 2016 Projects

Google Summer of Code 2016

Welcome students!

This page is about our GSoC projects. If you are interested, please read about how to get involved and check out our GSoC blog posts. Do have a look at our 2016 Mentors and get in touch!

If you have questions about GSoC 2016, ask Lea who will coordinate GSoC student projects, in particular the Cookbook.

Main focus

This year's GSoC is about improving Shogun, rather than extending it (exceptions allowed). We also want to recruit new long-term developers.

• Focus on existing algorithms: We want to improve our algorithms - easier use, efficiency, better documentation and more applications - rather than just adding more algorithms.
• Focus on students: We want to have fewer students - more intense mentoring, interaction between students, blogging and documenting for individual students.

Projects

When thinking about a project, please note that projects are roughly ordered by priority and that projects in bold type are more likely to happen. In addition to the technical project, in the final phase of GSoC all students will:

• peer-review a fellow student's work
• jointly help with the 5.0 release
• contribute to our GSoC blog

Furthermore, all students will work together on building a Shogun cookbook in addition to their main project. We're pretty excited about the outcome of this experiment!

Improving Shogun - main focus

Projects improving Shogun are the main focus of this year's GSoC. They are roughly ordered by priority and most of them do not focus on Machine Learning but rather on software engineering.

• Easy installation on major platforms
• Unified ML interface, plugin-based architecture
• Fundamental ML: The usual suspects
• A Shogun Detox
• SWIG, Matlab & modular interfaces
• HMM cleanup and application
• Native MS Windows port
• Unifying Shogun's linear algebra
• Flexible modelselection 2

Extending Shogun:

Note that projects extending Shogun have a lower priority than projects improving Shogun.

Algorithms

• Gaussian Processes & tensorflow autodiff
• Hip Deep learning
• Fundamental ML: LGSSMs
• Density Estimation in Infinite Dimensional Exponential Families
• Large scale statistical testing
• Solver for the KKT System
• Dual coordinate ascent solver for SO-SVM
• LP/QP Framework
• Debiasing & Cluster computing

Framework

• MCMC & Stan
• Independent jobs Framework
• Shogun cloud extensions

Other ideas:

• Cool pipelines
  • A kaggle pipeline for supervised prediction.
  • Spectrometer (there is an open-source hardward project on this)
  • Music brainz predictions (The cool hair guy at GSoC is the one we should talk to here)
  • Some bio thing?
  • Collaboration with MLPack for toolkit wide performance/accuracy testing

Infrastructure:

• REST interface

Potential projects

This is a growing list. To add, please create a new wiki page for each project that you describe. Name them as "GSoC_2016_project_XXX" etc. Here is a template.