[2009-2010] Present yourself!

[yingzuo]

Hi everyone! My name is Ying Zuo and I am a Software Engineering student at San Jose State University, California. Although I have taken numerous courses during my degree, I would call myself as a recreational programmer who enjoys writing quality code and solving challenging problems.

This is the first time I am reaching out to be a part of an open source project. However, I am volunteering as the developer and Webmaster for the website of Society of Women Engineers at SJSU. I am also working as a Student Technician on campus, and help trouble-shooting the Windows/Unix based computers and other equipment.

Having taken up programming in Java three years ago, I feel at home with it. I have some degree of experience developing Java Swing applications both for school as well as personal programming projects. I am good at Core Java, XML, SQL, and JavaScript.

I would love to work on Data Laboratory project because I am very interested in Java Swing programming and large data sets. I believe problems associated with display and manipulation of large data sets is something that can be definitely improved. I am also taking a class in Human Computer Interaction, and this project can be a real world experience of the principles I learnt in that course.

I am very excited about this opportunity to be a part of the GSOC program working on the data laboratory project. I really hope that I am given the chance to contribute.

Cheers,
Ying Zuo

[panisson]

Hi all,

My name is André Panisson. I am a PhD student in Computer Science at Informatics Department, University of Turin, Italy. I completed my Bsc and Msc in Computer Science at Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, where I maintain interactions with researchers in the Computer Networks group.

I am participating now in the Computer and Security Network group at University of Turin, and our main research areas are distributed applications that involves P2P and Social-based approaches. I am also contributing to the Complex Networks and Systems Research Group at ISI Foundation and the SocioPatterns project, under the coordination of Prof. Ciro Cattuto.

Recently, I worked in the implementation of a recommender system for web-based Personal Video Recorders, a work which involved the analysis of a huge similarity graph of ~100k users and ~5 million connections. My group is also working in analysis of other social networks as Last.fm, Flickr and Anobii. I have interest in the dynamics of information forwarding in mobile networks, which involves the analysis of contact graphs in real and simulated environments.

Who presented Gephi to me was Prof. Ciro Cattuto at ISI Foundation in Turin. We are working in the SocioPatterns project, which aim is the development and deployment of an experimental social interaction sensing platform. This platform consists of portable sensing devices and software tools for aggregating, analyzing and visualizing the resulting data.

The SocioPatterns project currently uses Gephi mainly for exploratory data analysis and visualization, but the feature that really excits me is the support for dynamic networks, and the readiness of the Gephi data model for dynamical update of graph topology and attributes.
This suits very well the large-scale real-time data sources we are dealing with. The potential for processing live streams from our experiments is a unique feature that we are eager to see implemented.

As I have already good skills as a Java programmer, my goal for this application is to give a high-quality contribution to the Gephi project, and make it a better tool for research in complex networks.

Regards,
André.

[avinashThummala]

My name is Avinash Thummala. I am a Dual degree (B.Tech. + MS) student at IIIT-H (International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad, India). I have finished my B.Tech. I am on the verge of my thesis as well. With my thesis wrapped up, I will have ample time over the summer to do something else. You can contact me at avinash.t.iiit@gmail.com or avinash_t@research.iiit.ac.in .

I am familiar with Java (Swing, Java 3D, J2EE), C/C++, Python and Perl. I do most of my coding in Java. I built a multi / single player Ludo game using Java. I made two versions for this game, one using Swing and the other using Java 3D. I Designed a transaction manager similar to the one used by an application server. It was built using Java and XML. I also built the “Tiger” compiler using C++, Lex and Yacc.

A professor told us about Gephi as part of a course (“Graph theory”) that I took last year. As far as I know, Gephi is the best out there for graph visualization, editing etc. and the cherry on top is that it is open source as well. So we can use it to test our own algorithms.

My MS Thesis is based on graphs, so I have a thorough understanding of different graph algorithms. That is why I wanted to work with Gephi over the summer. My main interest is the data laboratory project.

We need not restrict ourselves to only this proposal. I would be more than happy to lend a hand in some other development of Gephi as part of this summer and even beyond. I look forward to working with you guys.

[admin]

Hi students,

Thanks for all of your proposals, most of the 26 (10 more than last year!!) worth a slot! It's now time for Gephi team to review them and guide you to achieve the writing of outstanding proposals...

Some stats:
#candidates, project
7 Data Laboratory
4 Direct social network import
3 Dynamic attributes and statistics
3 Graph streaming API
3 Force-directed edge bundling
2 Shader engine
2 Support for Neo4j in Gephi
1 Web-based network visualization engine with WebGL -> very weird as we said that we dismissed this project.
1 Implementation of sources and sinks for vertices within Gephi

World map of the applicants here.

In order to save some time, please make sure you included a roadmap and a list of expected hurdles. A roadmap/timeline is mandatory to evaluate your ability to plan your work. Identifying hurdles or difficulties help us to prepare mentor's work.

How to succeed or fail at Google Summer of Code ? I advise you to watch this interviews : http://www.fosslc.org/drupal/node/374
Also have a look on these 10 golden rules for starting with open source if you're new in the field

[admin]

Hi,

The official results will be announced by Google tonight...you can wait by reading this article: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, it's plenty of wisdom.

[admin]

Hi students,

In the name of the team I would thank all of you for your participation. Choosing only six of you were extremely difficult because of the quality of most proposals. We requested a 7th slot, but didn't succeed in getting one more. As Gephi is still a young project and will continue to grow until next summer, I have good faith that today selected students become mentors themselves for next GSoC, hence appealing contributors to work on their sides, like Julian and Jeremy.

I personally congratulate Yi, Martin, Andre, Christopher, Cezary and Antonio for their ability to demonstrate high values and motivation, and passing through the hell's gate of technical and skills requirements. Guys, your detailed proposals were outstanding!

Therefore GSoC is just a piece of life for an open source project. Other contributors are welcome! Be part of the community is a chance to exchange knowledge in the field of complex networks / networks science, and improve your programming skills. We won't have as much time to spend with everybody as we would like to, but we will always help you using and developing Gephi the best way we can

Note that we will probably build a Student Contest in winter with smaller projects. Keep in touch!

[mbastian]

Hi students,

Thank you for so much enthusiasm and great work. I'm sorry for those who didn't make it, I'm sure you enjoyed the experience and learn a lot.

Congrats to winners, you're now part of the team and we want to make you comfortable. In the next two weeks we will know each other better, work on specifications and make it clear how we will communicate and exchange information. That is the plan to maximize knowledge sharing and communication:

* A new dev mailing-list has been created, we didn't use such a ML yet but it will become the root of all code questions. It's not always easy to understand and reuse someone else's code. I'll will answer all your questions on APIs and share the maximum about Gephi's internal design there.
* The wiki has now a Dev Portal, each of GSoC projects has a specification page you can fill. Please copy-paste your application there and complete with all the information you found useful to describe your plan. We will discuss together and freeze remaining hesitations.
* Have a Video call with your mentor, to know each other better. Your mentor will contact you.
* Create and publish your branch on Bazaar. Have a look here and see Code Sharing wiki page. You'll all have your own branch for working on your project.

Good luck and welcome to the Gephi team, you can really make a difference here, I'm very excited to work with you

[Payne]

Hi Gephi community,


I am very happy that I was chosen as a student. To all this communication, branches and mailing lists, I will join it at the end of this week because of a lot of work in the school. I am actually still reading some articles about indexing and at the end of this week I will make a document summarizing some ideas, problems and maybe also implementation details in similar form as I made previous proposals.

Again thanks for choosing and the idea of winter contest is very good, I will surely join it .

[cezar_1]

Hi,

First of all I want to thank you for choosing me to cooperate. I will not disappoint you.

Getting down to brass tacks, I will do all the necessary things at the end of the week. As the colleague above, I also have got some school work at the moment (especially one nasty exam concerning BPM).

I hope we will have got a fruitful collaboration

[admin]

Hi all,

Let's read this article about the applications of network science: http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/05/networked

It greatly outlines what's at stake!