Hi, in approximately one months time mentoring institutions can propose projects for the Google Summer of Code 2009, see
http://code.google.com/soc/ Last year the R Foundation succesfully participated with 4 projects, see http://www.r-project.org/SoC08/ for details. We want to participate again this year. Our project proposals will be managed by Manuel Eugster (email address in CC). Manuel is one of my PhD students and mentored the Roxygen project last year. This mail is mainly intended to make you aware of the program, Manuel will send a followup email with more technical details in the next days. In this phase we are looking for potential mentors who can offer interesting projects to students. I don't think that we will get much more than 4-6 projects, so don't be disappointed if you propose something and don't get selected. There are two selection steps involved: (a) The R Foundation has to compile an official "ideas list" of projects, for which students can apply. Last year we had 8 of those. After that, we (b) get a certain number of slots from Google (4 last year) and all prospective project mentors can vote on which projects actually get funding. Currently we are looking for good ideas for phase (a). I give no guarantees that all ideas will get on our official ideas list, what we pick depends on the number of submissions and topics, respectively. We want to make sure to have a broad range of themes, it is unlikely, that we will, e.g., pick 10 database projects. Also keep in mind that students have only three months time. This is not a research exercise for the students, you should have a rough idea what needs to be done. Last year we had a majority of "infrastructure projects", and only few with focus on statistical algorithms. We got a lot of applications for the latter, so don't hesitate to formulate projects in that direction. Important infrastructure may get precedence over specialized algorithms, though, because the whole community can benfit from those. But that will be a decision in phase (b), and we are not there yet. Please don't send any ideas to me right now, wait for the above mentioned email by Manuel on the technical details for idea submission. Best, Fritz -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch Institut für Statistik Tel: (+49 89) 2180 3165 Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Fax: (+49 89) 2180 5308 Ludwigstraße 33 D-80539 München http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Journal Computational Statistics --- http://www.springer.com/180 Münchner R Kurse --- http://www.statistik.lmu.de/R ______________________________________________ R-devel@r-project.org mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
