GSoC Introduction and Project Discussions

[Vivek Pal]

Hello,


I hope your day is going well! Allow me to introduce myself. My name is
Vivek Pal. I'm an undergraduate majoring in Computer Science Engineering at
Delhi Technological University in New Delhi, India. I have been taking up
number of courses on Machine Learning from various MOOC platform like
MITx, Coursera, Edx and Udacity. Also, I have more than 4 years of coding
experience in C++, C and python. I took my first course on Computer Science
in high school and started writing working programs in C++ since then.I
have keen interests in Machine Learning and IR systems. I had also
implemented a small search engine from scratch as a part of college
project.

I have read at least half a dozen research papers related to different
algorithms, implementation models and framework over the period of last 5-6
months. I also started contributing to different projects like OpenCog
recently. However, those were minor contributions. Here's my Github profile
link for reference: https://github.com/ivmarkp .


I intend to contribute in Xapian project via GsoC '16. I have been lurking
around in IRC channel to gain an insight into the code of conduct from last
week and honestly had some hesitation to begin interacting. Also, may be it
is some bad luck that I have exams from coming Monday (right when
application period starts :-/) Therefore, I was busy preparing for it and
hence couldn't devote fair amount of time to interact in the project
community.*I seriously apologize for showing up late. *I have actually
planned the rest of my days in the following manner :-


*I will do some small but crucial tasks in the exam week like reading
required papers and try to gather as much information I can which will help
me greatly in the long run**. I will also prepare a rough draft ready and
get feedbacks on it. **Although, good thing is that the exams will get over
by 18th March which gives me 7 days(18 - 24th March) before the application
period ends to refine my proposal. I know it might be less time but I can
literally devote my whole day into getting my proposal in good shape once
my exams get over. Also, since I have everything set up already now, I'll
quickly get familiar with in's and out's of the code base and how to use
it. *

After checking out proposed project ideas, I am quite interested in working
on these projects:


1.* Project: Weighting Schemes* - Familiar with how it works but no
significant prior experience.

2. *Project: Clustering of Search Result**s *- I have prior experience in
clustering. I did an ML project in college in which basically, I made a
recommendation system using CF and then had user clustered for generating
final recommendations which gave better results.


Presently, I'm reading articles mentioned under Resources section of both
project and I'll try to understand thoroughly all I can and will request to
get all my doubts sorted in subsequent e-mails. Please guide me further for
getting myself up to speed with the project.

Also, I was wondering that is it possible that these projects are already
assigned to other students already on the account of their prior
contributions?

One thing I want to make a point on is the *extensive* and *very helpful*
guidelines for anyone who wants to get involved in this project. I was able
to build and install easily on my system. Thanks so much for putting
together this documentation. I'm basically following guidelines on this
page :-

https://xapian-developer-guide.readthedocs.org/en/latest/contributing/new-contributors.html



Thank you for your time. Have a good day!


Vivek Pal

B.Tech, CSE

Delhi Technological University

New Delhi, India
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