Xapian discuss - Mar 2014 - Contribute in the Xapian project throgh GSoC.

Hi everyone,
My name is Shreedhar Pawar. I am a Software Engineering  MS student from
San Jose State University. I have an immense interest in Information
Retrieval and Machine Learning and look forward to contribute Xapian in its
 "Ranking project". My previous work includes a research
paper(attached
below), though not related to this topic represents my experience in
Programming and algorithms(I had proposed a novel Image Segmentation
algorithm for Parallel hardware that boosted getting depths of objects in
 an image).

I  think that I would be able to contribute in the Learning to Rank and the
Cluster Analysis algorithms. Having studied it in my undergrad, I have a
deep understanding of support vector machines, supervised and unsupervised
learning and have implemented codes in Matlab and Python in my lab work.

Other than that I am a regular C++ programmer and a linux user. Also very
familiar with the OSS community, having contributed in the OpenCL(a
Parallel computing language)  AMD forums.

 I am hoping to make use of the SoC program to get some mentoring regarding
the xapian project and hopefully become a contributor to the Search Engine
library.

Cheers...!

On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 12:34:49AM -0700, Shreedhar Pawar
wrote:
> I  think that I would be able to contribute in the Learning to Rank and the
> Cluster Analysis algorithms. Having studied it in my undergrad, I have a
> deep understanding of support vector machines, supervised and unsupervised
> learning and have implemented codes in Matlab and Python in my lab work.
Hi Shreedhar,

Thanks for introducing yourself.

If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading our guide to GSoC, which
should help with the next steps:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC%20Guide

While you're welcome to submit multiple proposals based on different
project ideas, we'd generally recommend you focus on one, unless you
have a lot of spare time before the submission deadline.

Cheers,
    Olly

Thanx for a prompt reply.

I was thinking  that the Xapian Search/Letor Algorithm,  can speed up using
 Parallel computing. Techniques like Map-reduce, 'compact n split',
radix
sort, scan,  parallel hashing n much more can be used to speed up the
learning algorithms as well  as the search... support vector machines in
the Letor algorithm involves heavy computations at the training data-set
stage which could be speed up again by using parallel computing. Should I
consider this for writing my proposal, I mean are there any chances that we
implement Letor in a Parallel way...? OpenCL is an open source parallel
computing language which can be implemented with C/C++ and we get much help
on forums.

Regards,
Shreedhar.


On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 2:16 AM, Olly Betts <olly at survex.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 16, 2014 at 12:34:49AM -0700, Shreedhar Pawar wrote:
> > I  think that I would be able to contribute in the Learning to Rank
and
> the
> > Cluster Analysis algorithms. Having studied it in my undergrad, I have
a
> > deep understanding of support vector machines, supervised and
> unsupervised
> > learning and have implemented codes in Matlab and Python in my lab
work.
>
> Hi Shreedhar,
>
> Thanks for introducing yourself.
>
> If you haven't already, I'd recommend reading our guide to GSoC,
which
> should help with the next steps:
>
> http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC%20Guide
>
> While you're welcome to submit multiple proposals based on different
> project ideas, we'd generally recommend you focus on one, unless you
> have a lot of spare time before the submission deadline.
>
> Cheers,
>     Olly
>