[2011] Present yourself!

[luizribeiro]

Hi,

My name is Luiz Gustavo Cardoso Ribeiro. I'm a Computer Engineering student in Brazil, currently in the senior year. Graph theory is one of my favorite computer science areas (my undergraduate thesis is related to journey planning) and hence my interest in Gephi.

Even though I usually write code in C++, I've been a Java programmer for about 5 years (learned Java just before I was a freshman on college) and I have a lot of programming experience and algorithmic background, because I've been participating on programming contests (ACM-ICPC, TopCoder, etc) since high school. Besides C, C++ and Java, I also have experience with Python.

I've found Gephi about two weeks ago, while searching for graph visualization tools for my undergraduate thesis and I've been using it since then.

I'm really interested in participating on Summer of Code this year, and since my undergraduate thesis is related to graph theory, it would be very exciting to work on Gephi.

From the official proposals, I'm mainly interested on moving Gephi's build system to Maven or on porting the Gython language as a console plugin to Gephi (although I'm used with Python, I have no experience with Gython and GUESS yet, but I'm sure I won't have any issues learning it).

Also, I think that Gephi would be benefited if it had a Blueprints implementation, since the Gremlin graph traversal language could be used for querying the graph structures created with Gephi. But I'm not sure if that would go along with Gephi's goals on this year's GSoC (working on core improvements).

Best Regards,
Luiz Ribeiro

[joshua]

Hello everybody,

I'm Joshua Cole, an aspiring statistician and programmer.

As you might have inferred already, I have an interest in statistics. In the past I've analyzed the results of a Google programming competition. Right now I'm reading through Edward Tufte's book “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.” In the future I hope to be working with Gephi to produce web-based network visualizations.

I think a good first step in tackling this problem might be going through some high-quality lessons I found through Hacker News and leveraging what I learn to get a working prototype. I'll wait until I learn more before further speculation.

You probably want to know whether I can handle this project. I probably can. Though I'm a computer science major, I do have a bit of practical experience. I tend to do a lot of personal projects outside the classroom:

• Hacker Archives
  • Language: Clojure
  • This site scrapes content from Hacker News into a searchable and editable wiki. It is still under developmental and I would appreciate if it wasn't shared beyond this forum until I finish integrating markdown.

• Personal Site
  • Language: Clojure
  • This site lists some of the projects I've worked on. I'm trying to use it to take some control over my web presence.
    
    Keep in mind that this doesn't actually show all the things I've done. I don't share the things I'm still working on.

• Find Function
  • Language: Clojure
  • This is my only contribution to an open source project. It is an IRC bot plugin that finds functions based on their input and output.
    
    For example if you were to type

    Code: Select all

    find_fn 1 2 3

    it would return

    Code: Select all

    add

    because 1 + 2 = 3.
    
    The plugin has been very well received. It is used frequently in #clojure and has been merged into the bot proper.

• Extendable
  • Language: C++
  • This is a question and answer bot I built for my uncle. It runs on a proprietary video chat protocol that made C++ the best choice.
    
    The existing question and answer bots for this protocol required a new program to be written for each new game. When my uncle asked me to write him a bot that didn't currently exist I took it upon myself to write an infinite number of bots. A new program per bot every time he wanted a new game didn't sound very appealing to me.
    
    Thus, the project name. When you toss this program a Q&A file it generates a new game, complete with score tracking, admin functions, permission rules, and settings.

• Rater
  • Language: Python
  • Rater doesn't have a link, but it is pretty awesome. It isn't launched mainly due to a fear of success outlined below. It is my attempt at creating a better RateMyProfessor and it scratched an itch.
    
    Though built with Django and capable of narrowing the results through full-text search, neither of these features are why I love this program. I love it for the insight which produced it.
    
    If you ask a student to rank their teachers from best to worst it might seem like you just have a list of teachers, but you have more than that. You can trivially create a list of ordering-preserved pairs of teachers. The cool insight is that such a pair can actually be thought of as a match in a game. So that is how I thought of them. This opened the way to using the Elo algorithm to determine teaching ability.
    
    It worked out pretty well in testing, but as I mentioned earlier I was a little afraid of success. Assuming the application got popular it would result in the students using the site snagging the best teachers, with the worst teachers as leftovers. I'm just not sure that inflicting that sort of bias on the education system is wise. I mean it seems cool, but what if your the guy eating the leftovers?

• Anagram Scramble
  • Language: Python
  • This site is pretty simple. Users race to unscramble words. Word info is fetched so people can expand their vocabulary while playing. It supports concurrent users and keeps track of scores if you register.

• Chess
  • Language: Java
  • This is the only project worth mentioning that I did as part of my coursework. It was a two person self-directed final project for an Intro to Java class. My partners task was to handle the rules while I handled the GUI and networking. He didn't do anything, but my contribution earned us both an A.

Alright. I've introduced myself, shared my interests, shown you what I've done in the past, and told you what I'm hoping to work on. I guess I'll leave it at that. I hope I'll get to work with some of you over the course of the summer.

[admin]

Hi students,

Welcome to Gephi GSoC program! I hope you're motivated to work on cutting edge technology for Network Science and graph visualization. Last year was really hard for us to select the best of you for only 4 slots allowed by Google. Hence to help us identifying you as a valuable candidate, please present yourself on this thread, then fill in this questionnaire and return it by email in plain text to gsoc@gephi.org.

This summer will be hot !

Deadline is April 8 (see the Timeline)

[vojtech_b]

Hello,

I am Vojtech Bardiovsky, a computer science masters student. My main study area is Discrete Algorithms, which includes sub-areas such as graph theory and data structures.

I have done a lot of projects in Java, the last noticeable one was a part of my Bachelors thesis and was a cellular automata simulator. Here I needed to design a good framework as it was a big project. The application works well, but I am not really satisfied with the framework and I wouldn't even call it good. That is one of the reasons for choosing Gephi: it is built on Netbeans Platform and I've always wanted to work with it, but never had time to get the most of it.

As for the GSoC, I am interested in working on the New Visualization Engine. I have experience with JOGL and even more with OpenGL (with C++).

What I like the most about Gephi is: it is really nice, it is useful and easy to work with and it has modular (and clean) design allowing anybody to contribute easily (importers, layout algorithms).

Vojtech

[keheliya]

Hi All,

I'm Keheliya Gallaba, a 4th year Computer Science and Engineering student from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. I enjoy making people's lives easier, better and happier using technology. Last year I had an internship at WSO2 Inc, working with WS-BPEL, Apache ODE and Eclipse plugin development. Here's a tutotrial I wrote related to that.

I have created a Mozilla Firefox add-on in javascript to convert Sinhala Non Unicode Web sites to Unicode. I'm very enthusiastic about infographics and data visualization. Here's a bundle of blogs I excessively read to learn about information visualization. That's how I got to know about gephi last year. I use gephi, GraphViz and few javascript libraries like protovis, infovis to do fun projects in the weekends.

I have contributed to GraphViz Java API with patches. I have submitted fixes for issues like 629374 and 604510 in Gephi as well. You can find my branch of gephi in launchpad here, where I have started experimenting with 'Integrate Web Browser' idea. I'm interested in 'Web-based network visualization with WebGL' and 'Automated build & Maven' ideas for GSoC 2011. I selected these ideas because of my passion to learn new technologies like WebGL and my experience with existing visualization libraries and build tools like Maven and Ant.

With the help of very friendly community of Gephi developers, I'm inspired to contribute to free software this summer and make a mark

[Yestin]

Hi all,
My Name is Yi Du (@Yestin). I'm a student of Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences. It's my third year here, and I I turned into a doctoral student in 2010.
I applied for GSOC last year, and the introduction I wrote in 2010 can be found as belows. I also had an English CV here :http://www.mildu.info/english/ You can get the pdf version here: http://www.mildu.info/wp-content/upload ... V_YiDu.pdf.

During GSOC 2010, I worked for the DSNI proposal. By doing that
*I gained some experiences on data processing and social network analysis.
*I learned a lot from @Sebastien and @Mathieu. They told me what is a good software architecture and what is a good UI design.
*Get familiar with Netbeans development, knowledge about Opensource license, etc.

I prepare to apply for Gephi again this year. I looked through the proposals listed, all of them are interesting. What I am interested in is Preview Refactoring and Timeline player.
I tried to do the force based edge bundling in GSOC 2010 and wrote a plan. I proposed to implement it in Graph view not Preview view, so most of them are helpless. But by doing that, I knew the algorithm well, which might be help. However, this year's proposal need to refactor the old Preview module, this might be difficult.
Telling about Timeline player proposal. This is a real interesting module. I looked through the related codes.
*I found the animation is not hard to implement, the core points are Timer and UI thread.
* As discussed, the unit and graduation is necessary. What I think now is an simple algorithm to initialize the unit and graduation, and allow user changing the unit at any time.
*The movie creation need an option panel, and movie creating toolkit(JMF as I know, because I implemented a min media player, and saw some related APIs).
*Some UI update is needed

Thank you very much for all your attention.

Hi all,
My Name is Yestin. It's my second year on my successive postgraduate and doctoral programs of study in Chinese Academy of Sciences now.

My research area is HCI, information visualization and sketch. During my R&D, I used a number of open-source project to do my favor. I used xstream to deal with XML files, jama to do matrix computation, JFreeChart and prefuse to display data and implement new algorithms. I used to use GEF(a framework based on Eclipse platform) to develop some graphic-edit based program and my graduation thesis(A pen-based graphical edit framework) is also based on it.

I often discuss problem I found on the forum and tell others the solution of the problem I met before. But I have not participate in any open-source project to do coding work. I want to do much more things for open-source community, and I found GSOC is a good opportunity for me to participate in. I am interest in the mentor way because he/she can help me to infuse quickly.

On the other side, I think the project I participate in is related to my recent work. I looked through the list and Gephi come into my eyes. Network visualization is an important part of infovis, and social network visualization is even hotter now. I am working on graph layout and combining, a novel tree layout algorithm has just been implemented using prefuse toolkit. In my view, Gephi is a graph visualization tool. It is developed in Netbeans in plug-in mode. I think it is easy to add new layout algorithm and any other new features.

I looked through the ideas of GSOC,I have confidence that I can do any of those things well:Dynamic attributes and statistics,Force-Directed Edge Bundling,Data Laboratory,Graph Streaming API,Direct Social Networks Import. I have downloaded the source of GSOC and I will read the docs and codes in detail. Not only for GSOC, but for further using.

I am familar with j2se. I often use swing or swt to develop interface of my program. Because of my IDE is Eclipse before, I am familar with plug-in develop mode too. To be honest, I seldom use Netbeans except for some small games based on j2me. But I think the IDE problem is easy to overcome.

Talking of new ideas about Gephi,I also think that using GPU to improve the performance of rendering is a good idea.Besides that, In my point of view, HCI techniques and cognitive theory can be thought of in the development of Gephi. For example, node text and edge text should resize while zooming the graph, if the node is too small, the text should not display even though the show text option is selected. I do not know whether these are help to the project:)

Thank you very much for your attention.

Yestin

[eaneiros]

Hello everyone,

my name is Ernesto Aneiros, I am an Engineering student in the United States planning to obtain a degree in Aerospace Engineering. I have been involved in coding competitions since High School and graph problems and algorithms are one of my favorite topics.

In the past year I worked as a Java Developer at a financial company developing internal support software and also trading software in which we used graph algorithms to analyze oil markets. During the research phase of this project I found Gephi as one of the leading projects related to graph visualization in the Java ecosystem.

For this year's GSOC, I am interested in working to bring Lucene indexing capabilities to Gephi and continue the work already started in the previous summer. My goal when I decided to enroll in GSOC was to get started in contributing to open source projects, get familiar with the process of working with the community, submitting patches, etc. and Gephi's Lucene project is an excellent opportunity for me to do so.

Best regards and happy summer coding!
Ernesto.

[admin]

Welcome to everyone!

Feel free to play with Gephi with some datasets or map your facebook network before looking at the code.

You can then either fix a bug or code a new small feature. I advise to take an export plug-in on Fundry, as we need them and are a bit funded.

Cheers!

[Neo---]

Hi guys,

I'm Urban Škudnik and I'm a physics student at University of Ljubljana, which means my academic work is not very connected with Gephi and its aims. I do, however, have extensive experience with development ranging from writing websites to programming video encoding system.

I do websites with HTML5, making them super beautiful with the latest and greatest CSS3, at the same time raising a bar of user experience for everyday Joe with nice and fluffy Javascript and _always_ keeping visually impaired in mind by using ARIA technologies to assist them with their browsing experience.

On the slightly more serious and less PR (;)) note I have extensive experience with Python (development of backend web applications, video processing system, desktop applications, etc.) and Vala (desktop application), which I had to learn and start using in a month for last years GSOC in which I worked for Ubuntu for a project Deja Dup.

In my free time I have recently acquired an interest in distributed computing which led me to start tinkering with Erlang, Amazon's EC2 and Gearman. Nothin' to show yet though and still getting my head around everything properly.

On an occasion or two I have also given lectures to a local community, mostly on web-related technologies - I introduced WebGL and certain helper libraries to them.

My CV with a more detailed explanation of my previous professional work can be found here.

For this year I would like to help Gephi team to develop a network visualization library with WebGL, a proposal into which I was already interested last year but that was ultimately rejected by the team itself for being too bleeding edge. This was certainly true (arguably, at least to a degree, it still is) and it is understandable that priorities shifted to other projects. But as pointed out by mbastian in the forum thread, WebGL is getting maturer by the day and it will see wider adoption in near- to medium future, at which point using WebGL to draw graphs will be the only sensible thing.

Cheers,
Urban

[danielb]

Hello,

My name is Daniel Bernardes, I'm a graduate student in LIP6 (Computer Science Lab at Paris 6 Univ.) in the ComplexNetworks team. More precisely I'm currently studying diffusion processes in large scale networks (e.g., files/memes/virus spreading in a P2P network). Before joining the team, I was a student at Ecole Polytechnique (Palaiseau/France) where I've got an engineering degree in applied math/cs. There I've worked on several academic projects, coded in Java and other languages.

I've came across Gephi since joining the LIP6, since my teammates are heavy users of graph visualization tools -- given the nature of our study. In fact this is one of my main motivations to contribute with this open-source project: to improve a critical tool which is complementary to our research. In particular, I'm interested in the Timeline player and movie creation proposal, since we are interested in investigating the evolution of dynamic graphs. From the Gephi perspective it might be interesting to have a coder with a clear application idea, to give testing feedback during the development.

For this edition of the GSoC I'm focusing exclusively on the Gephi proposal and it will be, hopefully, a great kickstart for me in the open-source community!

Cheers,

dB