Looks like student GSOC announcements are up (http://socghop.appspot.com/gsoc/program/list_projects/google/gsoc2010). Mahout got quite a few projects (5) accepted this year, which is a true credit to the ASF, Mahout, the mentors, and most of all the students! We had a good number of very high quality student proposals for Mahout this year and it was very difficult to choose. Of the ones selected, I think they all bode well for the future of Mahout and the students.
For those who didn't make the cut, I know it's small consolation, but I would encourage you all to stay involved in open source, if not Mahout specifically. We'd certainly love to see you contributing here as many of you had very good ideas. At any rate, for everyone, keep an eye out on the Mahout project, as you should be seeing lots of exciting features coming to Mahout soon in the form of scalable Neural Networks, Restricted Boltzmann Machines (recommenders), SVD-based recommenders, EigenCuts Spectral Clustering and Support Vector Machines (SVM)! Should be an exciting summer! -Grant
