[2009-2010] Present yourself!

[raj]

Hello all,
My name is Rajarshi(Raj) Mallik. Currently I am pursuing my masters degree in Computer Science at UMBC with focus on distributed data mining. Some of the interesting outcomes of data mining and machine learning techniques on structured, unstructured and semi-structured data cannot be visualized. More specifically evolving data streams and their underlying changes from social networks, blogs, tweets, news feeds, trends and alike makes more sense when visualized graphically. Gephi provides an excellent interactive platform for representing not only raw data but also derived information which can be user customizable. I'd like to work on Gephi plugins that shows empirical graphical results when new data mining algorithms are developed on (stream) data. Best place to start I believe is working on APIs for gephi that helps to import direct social data which is evolving over time.
I have worked in a startup for more than one year on java platform developing "push" framework for smartphones(android, blackberry) and is more or less versed with working on publicly available APIs. I'm also familiar with open source standards of project management, subversion etc.
I'm currently working on micro finance data project which identifies attributes of the data that influence the financing options and their effects on sectors, geographic locations etc.
I'd like to incorporate the "social data" gephi api's to the implementation of projects currently undergoing in my lab and would like to see it being used in similar projects or used simply just for fun. Would like to get involved with either graph stream api or direct social networks import.
Happy coding.

[Lucas]

Hello,

I am Lucas Stertz, a Sophomore at Bethel College majoring in Computer Science. I find Gephi to be a really great program with many possibilities, although I have only known about it since finding it through the GoSC list. While I am hoping to become a Game Designer, I would greatly enjoy working on Gephi, as I find the data structuring and graph display to be fascinating. I currently program in Java, with some experience in Java3D and JOGL. I also have quite alot of experience working with Java's Swing Library, although my experience in that field is derived through creating my own buttons and text fields instead of using the provided.

I would greatly enjoy working on any of the suggested ideas with the exception of the Web-based network visualization engine with WebGL and the Direct Social Networks Import projects. As previously stated I would be especially interested in working on or learning about the data structures and graph displays of Gephi. I would be very willing to learn and to do my best for the Gephi team on whatever project is provided.

For a previous, although outdated, example of my work you are welcome to check out www.remarkabletales.com/alphaexile.htm

Thank you for your consideration,
Lucas Stertz

[fat0ss]

Hello everybody,

My name is Aman Agarwal. I'd like to work on Web-based network visualization engine with WebGL
from Idea's list. I think I know OpenGL, Javascript quit well, have some experience in programming .I also did few project using javascript and OpenGL .
I am 3rd year student and In my university we Have the subject on Graphics and under this subject I created a project using ffmpeg and OpenGL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeA2rho8pn8
It's a kind of Animated movie with real characters
my hobby is website development and created a two website portals for projects also
I am doing coding in javascript from nearly 2 years

I'm student from India, currently attending my bachelor's degree in IT at Indian Institute Of Information Technology.

Thank you for your attention.
Aman Agarwal.
neshuagarwal1909@gmail.com
http://profile.iiita.ac.in/RIT2007054

[cklee]

Bonjour~

This community is way too cool. It's so international!

I'm a sophomore at Harvard University concentrating in Mathematics and doing a secondary in Computer Science. I am currently enrolled in Professor Hanspeter Pfister's CS 171: Visualization and saw this job post on the courses news feed. I like the course a lot, and I enjoy creating visualizations via Processing, so I thought I might apply. Given that the description mentioned Professor van Wijk also a factor, since we read his papers in class. Legit dude.

As for programming experience, I am a member of the Harvard Computer Society where we do cool projects for the student body, from writings scripts to manage lists and accounts for all campus organizations to the implementation of k-nearest neighbor algorithms for Datamatch every Valentines. Near spring break, we go down to MIT down the river and join them for Hackasaurus Rex. We also have a Google Games competition scheduled for this Saturday. Awesome opportunities, lots of fun.

On a more serious note, I've done research in high school, and I am now helping to write a visualization package for a Parallel Evolutionary Biology Suite developed at Harvard for researchers in the Pfitser Group. The suite is written in C and parallelized in MPI model evolutionary dynamic behavior to find emerging cooperative behaviors and mutations. It produces a considerably large data set of matrices needing to be visualized. This will only be a term-time project, and I do hope to devout my summer to the Force-Directed Edge Bundling project.

Confession: I had been following Sugar Labs IRC channels since January thinking that I'd apply for that. I've dabbled in their dev environment, but Gephi seems to have a brighter future, and the project matches my skill sets better.

Also, I got a tweet regarding the #neo4j project, but found no forum for discussion? I look forward to working with you guys.

Best,

Chris Lee
chris.kelvin.lee@gmail.com

[admin]

Hi all,

Thanks for everyone who presented himself publicly! This week is the beginning of the application period, which will end April 9. (see gsoc timeline)

As you know, we will ask to have 5 students, but it may be less because we are very busy this year. Some of you already noticed that the wiki page contains more proposals. The reason is that we will select nor the best students, nor the best proposals, but the best couples of student+proposal. If only one couple is valuable enough, only this one will be selected.

The consequences are not good news for you:

• I'm sorry for the beginners in computer science, but we can't take the time to mentor you the way we should to make you learn the basics. We know how strongly motivated you are, and the excitement of using your fresh skills in a real project, but you will learn with time that faith is not sufficient to be efficient. So take the time to learn, enjoy creating your own projects, code elsewhere than in courses, drink beer, and you'll become great.
• WebGL proposal will be canceled, unless an awesome student+proposal appears, as this technology is at its early stage of development.
• However, you can make a proposal based on your idea. Excellent proposals generally fit with a personal interest.
• Competition amongst students will be harder than last year. Write the maximum details in your proposal, and don't hesitate to try fixing some bugs. Being able to provide a patch demonstrates that you're autonomous with the code and your ability to analyze it.
• If too much people apply for the Data Lab /Import from social networks, we probably ask some of you to apply for the Graph streaming subject, as this is a core feature currently missing.

Good luck for this 2-weeks run, I'm sure you'll create awesome proposals!

Tip: a good proposal results on a good communication between you and Gephi developers. We greatly prefer someone having a good understanding of the needs with a not excellent (but good enough) programming skills, than a blinded code-killer.

EDIT: the Neo4j discussion is here.

[jbilcke]

Hi GSoCcers!

As a mentor this year, and after seeing all these students willing to enter the Gephi project,
I just wanted to introduce myself too, and say a couple of words!

First of all, reading all of your presentations, questions and proposals makes me very, very happy to be a mentor. You probably don't know it, but last year's proposal were great, I mean, just open-up Gephi, and you will see all the components developed by the students. It really add a lot of value to the whole.

To say the least, this year we much more students. Way much more.

You guessed right: this summer gonna be hot, and I hope everybody enjoy this exciting discovery phase of the GSoC!

My tip for the proposal writing: just be precise, and honest with your planning and capabilities.
Propose to do what you know and like the best, and if you're not accepted, well, don't take it too bad.
At this time you will certainly have some glimpses of what an open-source project like Gephi is, and what Graph Visualization is all about. It's not only the tool, and the code, but also the community around: developers, users, and their own good practices.


That said, we dismissed the WebGL idea (which would take too much work for a single GSoC, in my humble opinion), but as Sebastien pointed it out, we would be really glad to see someone with a proposal related to Neo4j, a mature, open-source graph database.
Such connector plugin, able to query large graph databases, would be awesome, and boost the development of both Gephi and Neo4J projects for a long-term collaboration.
And all that, thanks to the student who would take the proposal! It's not too late the read the Neo4j idea description :
http://wiki.gephi.org/index.php/Google_ ... j_in_Gephi

good luck everybody!

julian

[Abion47]

Hello world!

My name is Andrew Ackerman. I am currently a freshman at Southern Utah University, pursuing a Computer Science degree. Basically, my desires for a future career are pretty limiting, as I want to have a career that heavily involves computers, but also has aspects of art, drama, and music, as well as has a good chance of being in demand in the foreseeable future.

The careers I ended up with are animator and video game designer. Video game design was a god choice for me, since it was one of the things that I wanted to do anyway. I want to be able to work with a computer, rather than have to find a computer that will work with me. I want to produce programs and games that people will actually want to own.

Currently, I am following a game-in-beta known as Overgrowth, and I am learning a lot about the programming world, as well as programming tricks, from their daily progress blog.

The main problem with all of this is I may have run into a dead end with my school. I'm not learning what I want to learn, instead working through other tangents that are helpful, but are ultimately not in the direction I want. For my final this semester, I am trying to build a game from the ground up, using only Swing as a crutch. During the planning process, I looked into OpenGL intently, and although the parameters of the project say no outside libraries, if I could learn how to really use OpenGL, I believe that I could do a lot more with my talents than I am currently capable of.

Thank you for your consideration,
Andrew Ackerman

[admin]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for considering joining Gephi project, but I think you missed the point: the 3 months of GSoC are too short to take the time learning a complete technology from scratch and producing efficient code. It's not about you specifically, but an experience's fact. First things first, take the time to learn and enjoy the basics without any pressure, and play with your knowledge freely; this is the best way to become able to carry out great ideas.

[lcjunior]

Hello,

My name is Luiz Carlos Ferreira Junior and I'm from Brazil and I very
interested by the project Data Laboratory.

I'm currently the fourth year of Computer Engineering and also do
training in the area of software development using various programming
languages, as well as design standards and their proper documentation.

The project caught my attention because its goal is also something
that I believe and nothing better than to develop something that you
really believe and believe.

Another thing is that the knowledge required for their implementation
is knowledge that I have been searching for throughout my life in the
area of software and I want to learn more and more.

Well, I am very excited and really want to participate in GSoC is my
first participation and work on something that improving people's
lives as well as the free software community.

Then there was the possibility that I have a proposal for this
project. If you can have a model or template to follow.

Thank you.

[thobe]

Hi all,

I just thought I'd introduce myself here as well. My name is Tobias and I'll be mentoring the project of integrating Gephi with Neo4j from the Neo4j side of things. I work at the Swedish software startup Neo Technology, the commercial backer of Neo4j.

I've played around with Gephi a bit and really like it, and I believe it would be very beneficial for both of our projects to have a good integration between Neo4j and Gephi. It would of course also be of benefit to the student who gets to work on this project.

I had my first experience with the Google Summer of Code program as a student in 2007, working on the Jython project. Since then I am a regular speaker at Java conferences and Python conferences. I am set on giving any student I mentor the same kind of boost and support that I was given during my time as a SoC student.

Cheers,
Tobias