R devel - Feb 2009 - Google Summer of Code 2009

Hi,

in approximately one months time mentoring institutions can propose
projects for the Google Summer of Code 2009, see

  http://code.google.com/soc/

Last year the R Foundation succesfully participated with 4 projects,
see http://www.r-project.org/SoC08/ for details.  We want to
participate again this year. Our project proposals will be managed by
Manuel Eugster (email address in CC). Manuel is one of my PhD students
and mentored the Roxygen project last year. This mail is mainly
intended to make you aware of the program, Manuel will send a followup
email with more technical details in the next days.

In this phase we are looking for potential mentors who can offer
interesting projects to students.  I don't think that we will get much
more than 4-6 projects, so don't be disappointed if you propose
something and don't get selected.

There are two selection steps involved: (a) The R Foundation has to
compile an official "ideas list" of projects, for which students can
apply. Last year we had 8 of those. After that, we (b) get a certain
number of slots from Google (4 last year) and all prospective project
mentors can vote on which projects actually get funding.

Currently we are looking for good ideas for phase (a). I give no
guarantees that all ideas will get on our official ideas list, what we
pick depends on the number of submissions and topics, respectively. We
want to make sure to have a broad range of themes, it is unlikely,
that we will, e.g., pick 10 database projects. Also keep in mind that
students have only three months time. This is not a research exercise
for the students, you should have a rough idea what needs to be done.

Last year we had a majority of "infrastructure projects", and only few
with focus on statistical algorithms. We got a lot of applications for
the latter, so don't hesitate to formulate projects in that
direction. Important infrastructure may get precedence over
specialized algorithms, though, because the whole community can benfit
from those. But that will be a decision in phase (b), and we are not
there yet.

Please don't send any ideas to me right now, wait for the above
mentioned email by Manuel on the technical details for idea submission.

Best,
Fritz

-- 
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch 

Institut f?r Statistik                          Tel: (+49 89) 2180 3165
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t                  Fax: (+49 89) 2180 5308
Ludwigstra?e 33
D-80539 M?nchen                     http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
   Journal Computational Statistics --- http://www.springer.com/180 
          M?nchner R Kurse --- http://www.statistik.lmu.de/R

Two ideas:

1) A library for interactive plots in R

R lacks functionality that would allow displaying of interactive plots with two
distinct functionalities: zooming and panning. This functionality is extremely
important for the analysis of large, high frequency, data sets spanning over
large ranges (in time as well). The functionality should acknowledge Axis
methods in callbacks on rescale (so that it could be extended to user-specific
classes for axis generation) and should have a native C interface to R (i.e. no
Java, but such cross platform widgets like GTK or QT or anything similar that
does not require heavy-weight add-ons). GTK has been used successfully from
within R in many applications (RGtk, rgobby, EBImage etc) on both *nix and
Windows, and thus could be a preferential option, it is also extremely easy to
integrate into R. The existing tools (e.g. iplots) are slow, unstable and lack
support for time/date plots (or actually any non-standard axes) and they are all
Java. We are looking into stanard xy-plots as well as image and 3D plots.
Obviously one can think of further interactivity, but this would be too much for
the Summer of Code project. A good prototype would already be a step forward.

2) Cross platform GUI debugger, preferably further Eclipse integration (beyond
StatET capabilities)

Tibco has recently released the S+ workbench for eclipse which has a reasonable
support for non-command line debugging. In the R community, the StatET eclipse
plugin mimics a lot of code development functionality of S+ workbench, but has
poor support for in-line execution of R sessions in eclipse and does not have
debugging capabilities. Supporting this project further, or developing a GUI
debugger independent of eclipse, are both acceptable options. The debugger
should allow breakpoints, variable views etc.

For both of the above, our interest is mostly on the Linux side, but one should
look into cross-platform solutions.

Regards,
Oleg

Dr Oleg Sklyar
Research Technologist
AHL / Man Investments Ltd
+44 (0)20 7144 3107
osklyar at maninvestments.com 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: r-devel-bounces at r-project.org 
> [mailto:r-devel-bounces at r-project.org] On Behalf Of Friedrich Leisch
> Sent: 18 February 2009 22:54
> To: r-devel at r-project.org
> Cc: Manuel.Eugster at stat.uni-muenchen.de
> Subject: [Rd] Google Summer of Code 2009
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> in approximately one months time mentoring institutions can propose
> projects for the Google Summer of Code 2009, see
> 
>   http://code.google.com/soc/
> 
> Last year the R Foundation succesfully participated with 4 projects,
> see http://www.r-project.org/SoC08/ for details.  We want to
> participate again this year. Our project proposals will be managed by
> Manuel Eugster (email address in CC). Manuel is one of my PhD students
> and mentored the Roxygen project last year. This mail is mainly
> intended to make you aware of the program, Manuel will send a followup
> email with more technical details in the next days.
> 
> In this phase we are looking for potential mentors who can offer
> interesting projects to students.  I don't think that we will get much
> more than 4-6 projects, so don't be disappointed if you propose
> something and don't get selected.
> 
> There are two selection steps involved: (a) The R Foundation has to
> compile an official "ideas list" of projects, for which students
can
> apply. Last year we had 8 of those. After that, we (b) get a certain
> number of slots from Google (4 last year) and all prospective project
> mentors can vote on which projects actually get funding.
> 
> Currently we are looking for good ideas for phase (a). I give no
> guarantees that all ideas will get on our official ideas list, what we
> pick depends on the number of submissions and topics, respectively. We
> want to make sure to have a broad range of themes, it is unlikely,
> that we will, e.g., pick 10 database projects. Also keep in mind that
> students have only three months time. This is not a research exercise
> for the students, you should have a rough idea what needs to be done.
> 
> Last year we had a majority of "infrastructure projects", and
only few
> with focus on statistical algorithms. We got a lot of applications for
> the latter, so don't hesitate to formulate projects in that
> direction. Important infrastructure may get precedence over
> specialized algorithms, though, because the whole community can benfit
> from those. But that will be a decision in phase (b), and we are not
> there yet.
> 
> Please don't send any ideas to me right now, wait for the above
> mentioned email by Manuel on the technical details for idea 
> submission.
> 
> Best,
> Fritz
> 
> -- 
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
> Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch 
> 
> Institut f?r Statistik                          Tel: (+49 89) 
> 2180 3165
> Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit?t                  Fax: (+49 89) 
> 2180 5308
> Ludwigstra?e 33
> D-80539 M?nchen                     
> http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch
> --------------------------------------------------------------
> ---------
>    Journal Computational Statistics --- http://www.springer.com/180 
>           M?nchner R Kurse --- http://www.statistik.lmu.de/R
> 
> ______________________________________________
> R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
> https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel
> 
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Thanks for pointing out. playwith looks quite interesting

Dr Oleg Sklyar
Research Technologist
AHL / Man Investments Ltd
+44 (0)20 7144 3107
osklyar at maninvestments.com 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Liviu Andronic [mailto:landronimirc at gmail.com] 
> Sent: 19 February 2009 15:11
> To: Sklyar, Oleg (London)
> Cc: Simon Urbanek; Friedrich Leisch; 
> Manuel.Eugster at stat.uni-muenchen.de; r-devel at r-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Rd] Google Summer of Code 2009
> 
> On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 3:47 PM, Sklyar, Oleg (London)
> <osklyar at maninvestments.com> wrote:
> > I do think there is a need for an interactive graphics 
> package for R.
> >
> There are also the GTK-based playwith, and latticist; unsure though
> whether they fit your requirements.
> Liviu
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Do you know how to read?
> http://www.alienetworks.com/srtest.cfm
> Do you know how to write?
> http://garbl.home.comcast.net/~garbl/stylemanual/e.htm#e-mail
> 
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Simon,

as promised I attach a simple package that utilises gtkdatabox. It is
Linux only, sorry for that: as it was hacked together in the last two
hours I did not have time for Windows stuff.

Under my Ubuntu I only had to install libgtkdatabox-dev from standard
repos (which would pull libgtk2-dev where necessary). The package relies
on gtkdatabox being found under the standard pkg-config path (i.e.
custom path installs would be difficult until compiler flags are
manually changed). This is for simplicity of ./configure

After installing, simply run example(databox) and use your mouse for
zooming-in with quite a standard left mouse click for drawing a
selection box (a click is required within a selection to zoom in); right
mouse click zooms out. I think it is CTRL-right or SHIFT-right to zoom
out to full scale.

This is a kind of functionality I would like to see. I do not mean the
gtkdatabox, but the idea.

With this one it is quite easy to add more plots to the window and as
the user has control over callbacks it is easy to do autorescale on
multiple plots if required. The limitation is the ruler of the
gtkdatabox itself (no time), no NA treatment, implementation via
increases pix buffer on zoom (rather than off-screen) etc.

I do not know if r-devel will allow a tar.gz source through, but if
anybody else is interested, please let me know and I will send the
source directly.

Best,
Oleg

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On Feb 19, 2009, at 16:36 , hadley wickham wrote:
>> What we need is a more general framework for interactive graphics -  
>> this
>> requires more than just a graphics subsystem - you have to depart  
>> from the
>> concept of graphics objects and include "statistical objects"
in
>> the mix
>> such that the underlying data/statistics etc. can be identified by  
>> linking
>> back though the graphics. This is something we still lack in R ---  
>> but I
>> hope we will get there sooner or later...
>
> Well apart from the interactivity, you have that with ggplot2.
>
Ehm - interactivity is the point here ...

Cheers,
S