The 14th Google Summer of Code results were announced today and I am thrilled to be working with the people at Shogun.

My proposal to the project Inside the BlackBox was accepted. The major goals I am going to be working on is using premature stopping all over shogun’s codebase.

The backbone for this was beautifully written by my mentor Giovanni De Toni last year. This interests me because debugging ease is something everyone is excited about for the obvious reason that debugging can be frustrating. In machine learning, our models and algorithms do seem like black boxes with an input plugged in and generating meaningful output, especially when we do it in other languages through wrappers.

What we want to achieve is try to take the user along with the algorithm so that he can see what the algorithm is seeing and then make better and informed decisions.

First step would be to list out my domain for this task namely what am I am going to touch and how. This does involve frisking all of shogun’s algorithms and finding the ones we like. Thankfully someone( it was Ken Thompson, cheers to him) created grep. We will be getting familiar with a large number of algorithms and deciding what is meaningful for each of them.

Aside from this I will also be working to complete the trasition to factory methods in meta examples. The new API is definately interesting that our mentors have developed piece by piece. Lets take all that love and give it a place to live in our meta examples. This week I am going to try to have my already open prs merged. I have my final semester exams from next week and they will definately eat up most of my time for now.

We are going to have an IRC session soon enough to discuss how everything is really going to happen. Interacting with my mentors is definately something I have been looking forward to since I first found shogun a few months ago. I am more interested in how they want to go about the project. This will provide me with a proffessional opinion that I am ready to understand and henceforth work with.

I am also reading previous gsoc blogposts at Shogun, numFOCUS and other organisations to get a feel of how this summer is going to unfold. This is a pretty interesting and fun thing to do. Its always a great time trying to dive into the minds of people you are going to be working with/like. :D