On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 10:05:19PM +0100, Gael Varoquaux wrote:
> Hi Vlad and Andy,
> 
> First of all, Vlad, thanks for offering to take up the less sexy work. I
> don't think that maintenance can qualify as a GSOC project. A big
> refactor could, but I don't think that we need one right now.

What about a "speed freak"-themed GSOC? Some things I can think of:

a) sparse coding is about 2 orders of magnitude slower than competing
   implementations right now, making it kind of useless except in toy
   1996-sized situations (I'm supposed to find a way to benchmark
   this for Alex, but I can tell you that the situation is fairly bad
   currently, compared to e.g. SPAMS; Olivier said this had something to
   do with a badly optimized convergence check)

b) a few things things could benefit from Cython rewrites

c) several things could probably benefit from Cython's newfound OpenMP
   capabilities to parallelize across different GIL-free worker threads

d) patching liblinear to work with dense matrices

e) patching LOTS of things to accept and operate natively on float32
   (this can be quite important when working with huge data where
   doubles simply aren't an option -- Cython fused types will make this
   simpler in some cases)

> With regards to reaching 1.0 release, one thing that I would really like
> to achieve is a real online learning API and set of examples. The reason
> that I would like to get this done before 1.0 is that I feel that going
> through such design could force us to reconsider some of our API, and
> that should happen before 1.0. I would love to see such a project
> proposed by someone who has enough experience. Hopefuly we should be able
> to find mentors for it.

I think you're absolutely right on this front. Online learning does require a
different mindset from an API design perspective, we're only getting the hang
of it ourselves and it's basically all we ever do...

David

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