Greetings, developers! First and foremost, hearty congratulations to the mlpack team for being accepted in GSoC '17. I am honored to start an interaction with this hardworking and enthusiastic group.
I am Abhinav Kannan, a second year student of Computer Science at SRM University, Chennai, India. I am skilled at C++ and Python, with over three years of experience in the former, and am a lover of machine learning. Also, when it comes to computer studies, I am a very enthusiastic, fast and committed learner, having a knack of picking up concepts and solving problems by myself. I have nearly completed Andrew Ng's machine learning course by Stanford University on Coursera (certificate due in two weeks!), and since the course has been a worthwhile challenge, I am looking to take up an assignment that is bigger and tougher, yet achievable, over the summer. The project "Parallel stochastic optimization methods" is one which I am motivated to begin work on. I am currently in the installation phase of mlpack, running Ubuntu. Since it has been taking some time working by myslef around the installation, I've decided to reach out here before it's too late, as in the meanwhile, I have done some background research on the topics related to the project, which are new to me, such as SCD. Now having a basic idea of it, I did notice the limitations as well in this technique here <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_descent#Limitations>[1] and here <http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146317/coordinate-vs-gradient-descent> [2]. With respect to this task, Prof Ng's course gives an in-depth understanding of optimization algorithms such as gradient descent, alongside linear regression and logistic regression, with convex functions. Also covered in the course are stochastic (and batch) gradient descent, neural networks, map-reduce and data parallelism. There have been tests on these topics in the course's programming assignments and quizzes, which I have completed, and hence am confident of my understanding in these topics. I am also getting started with multi-threaded programming, as part of my coursework at university. I would love to begin work on this project soon (if not right away!), along with some inputs from the developers here. I feel contributing to mlpack will not just be an honor, but also give me a challenging, hands-on and memorable experience, besides enhancing my knowledge and helping me be part of the open source community. Looking forward to an early response. Regards, Abhinav [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_descent#Limitations [2] http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/146317/coordinate-vs-gradient-descent
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