Hi Dan, I think there are two reasons why you didn't get an answer yet.
The first reason is that the project is driven by volunteers and from my experience everyone here has lots of other things to do and usually only little time to spare for Mahout (unfortunately). You asked for guidance and mentorship of a bachelor thesis which I guess nobody can provide here. And IMHO this is also not the task of open source developers, your thesis should be supervised by someone from your university (for your own sake). The second reason is that it turned out over the last months that simply adding new algorithm implementations that are not production-tested did not help the project. We accepted lots of such contributions and it turned out that people did not maintain them or that they were of minor quality. That's why we choose to be more conservative with what we accept. It turned out that it's not that hard to implement algorithms on MapReduce but its hard to do this in a really efficient way that will be helpful for others. I really like your enthusiasm and willingness to contribute to the project, but I'd say there are plenty more important things to do than contributing a new algorithm and a bachelor thesis is probably not the right setting to start the work on Mahout. Nevertheless you could find a topic related to Mahout (using Mahout or evolving some algorithm contained in it), have it supervised by someone from your university and after that maybe contribute your findings/bugfixes/whatever back. Best, Sebastian On 11.10.2012 22:20, Dan Filimon wrote: > On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 1:43 PM, Dan Filimon <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Hi Mahout Devs! >> >> I'm Dan Filimon, a 4th year undergrad student at Politehnica >> University Bucharest [1] and as part of graduating I need to work on >> final project. >> >> I've recently gotten very interested in AI and Machine Learning >> (enough to become convinced that I want to pursue a Master's in this >> field) but have just started learning. I'd like to work my way up to >> becoming a committer and as I learn more about ML and add new >> algorithms to Mahout. >> >> I could get a final project assigned to me by a professor, or work >> with a company, but I'd like to do Open Source work (I have done a bit >> before [2]). >> I'd like my final project (which includes a thesis) to be adding some >> (1, 2... n?) new (but well-tested) algorithms to Mahout and building >> an application based off them. Time-wise, the deadline for my project >> is sometime in July 2013. >> I can work on this part-time until about March and allocate more time >> afterwards. >> >> I think I can handle the theory (I really enjoy math and understand >> the basics of MapReduce framework), the working on a large code-base >> (I interned at Google twice, the first time even working on an >> open-source project [2]) and am comfortable in Java. >> >> Now, excited as I may be, the thing is I'm not sure where to start. I >> read around the Mahout web site, got a copy of the code, got the >> Mahout in Action book, got a bunch of ML books, am taking relevant >> classes in AI and ML at school this year... >> I'd like someone to help me figure out the hoops, guide my work and mentor >> me. >> I know this is asking a lot since I haven't actually _done_ anything >> for this project, but please... any volunteers? :) >> >> Thank you! >> >> [1] http://acs.pub.ro/index.php?site=prezentation&lg=english >> [2] https://github.com/dfilimon >> [3] http://code.google.com/p/sfntly/ > > Ping! > Also, for more info, my LinkedIn page is [1]. :) > > At least suggestions? Should I be taking a different approach here? > Try submitting some patches before asking again? Learning more first? > > [1] http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dan-filimon/23/845/540 >
