Hi Heiko,
Thanks for getting back to me so quickly! I'll be sure to apply for the project and begin working on some contributions soon. Spring break begins for me in a couple of days, so I should be able to dive in then. I'll also start looking into some alternative projects I could do with Shogun. Thanks again for your help, Trevor Ballard ________________________________ From: Heiko Strathmann <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, March 2, 2016 7:12 AM To: Trevor Ballard; [email protected] Subject: Re: GSoC 2016: Fundamental Machine Learning Algorithms Hi Trevor (cc shogun-list, please always include them in such emails) welcome to Shogun! Your background is totally suited to that project, so make sure to apply. Start with a small patch, as mentioned on our "getting involved" guide and the ideas page. There are tons of small improvements to start with -- then move to something that is closer to your planned project. We value initiative a lot, so feel free to come up with your own improvements. But again, start with something simple. On a side note: The fundamental project is likely to receive a lot of applications. Also have a look on the other projects we offer and consider having a fallback option. 2016-03-02 0:20 GMT+00:00 Trevor Ballard <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>: Hello Heiko, My name is Trevor Ballard and I'm a computer science undergraduate at the University of Central Florida. I see that you're mentoring the GSoC project of redesigning and improving Shogun's "usual suspect" ML algorithms. This opportunity sounds perfect for me, and I would love to help Shogun transition from just being a huge ML library to being a huge and fast ML library. I'm currently working in the Data Systems lab at UCF, where I spend most of my time working on front-end web stuff or proofreading department papers (most of which involve ML or computer vision). I plan to focus my PhD on machine learning in one form or another because I find it extremely interesting, and my time in the lab (surrounded by incredibly smart ML and CV researchers) has given me a good grasp of the topic. I'm working my way through CalTech's ML course, as well, to give me truly solid footing in the territory. I think redoing Shogun's more basic ML algorithms would really solidify my understanding of ML's fundamentals and would be a truly incredible way to get a start in the field. I'm a huge sucker for clean, efficient, functional coding, too, so taking an ok implementation to a problem and reiterating on it until it's amazing is an absolute blast for me. Sorry to write a novel, I'm just excited about the opportunity, and really look forward to hearing back from you about it. If you haven't already got another candidate you're pretty sure about, I'd like to talk to you further on what I'd be doing and how I could get ready for it. Thanks! Trevor Ballard [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> (P.S. the email on your github account is spelled incorrectly. You're missing the 'h' in "Strathmann".)
