Xapian devel - Mar 2020 - GSOC 2020 Introduction and Rank Clickstream project discussion

Hi,
I am Souvik Mandal. I am a final year Computer Science and Engineering
undergraduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology Indore. I
am interested in the "Learning to Rank Clickstream Data Mining"
project. I have previous experience in machine learning and also have
experience in C++, and python. As mentioned in the project
description, there can be a lot of areas that the project can be
extended, so should I choose a specific area out of the three?

Thanks and Regards,
Souvik Mandal

Hi Souvik,

On Mon, Mar 16, 2020 at 12:58:11AM +0530, Souvik Mandal
wrote:
> As mentioned in the project description, there can be a lot of areas
> that the project can be extended, so should I choose a specific area
> out of the three?
You should aim to propose a project with a suitable scope to keep you
occupied for the 3 month coding period.

I don't really know much about your skills or previous experience so
it's a little hard for me to judge, but I suspect a final year student
would probably run out of things to do if they just worked on one of
the suggested areas listed in the project idea.  You might be able to
expand on one of the suggested areas to create a suitably scoped project
though.

I should also point out that's completely fine (recommended even) to
mark some parts of your project plan as "stretch goals" - essentially
tasks you'd like to do if the other things go well.  We've found that
works much better than realising part way through that you were
optimistic about how much you could do and then having to cut down the
scope.

Cheers,
    Olly