This is the fourth and final post in our blog series about Google Summer of Code students working on NumFOCUS projects. (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.)
We are excited to introduce to the community our students working on Astropy, SunPy, and Shogun Machine Learning Toolbox this summer as part of Google Summer of Code.
GSoC with Astropy
Aarya Patil is a 3rd year student at Pune Institute of Computer Technology; her hometown is Pune, Maharashtra, India. This is her first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with Astropy?
I was introduced to night sky observations at a very young age, thanks to my father’s love for the stars, which I can now proudly say runs in our genes. It wasn’t until last year that I realised that astronomy was more than just a hobby for me. I thus ended up working with photometry and AstroPy for a year and it isn’t surprising that open source development came along my way, AstroPy introduced me to it. Hence, GSoC for this computer geek was to go through the projects under AstroPy, one of which was really relatable yet intriguing and I applied for it. Needless to say, I finally did get in and it’s exciting to know that I will actually be contributing to help the astronomical community out there.
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
It took me some time to understand the interdisciplinary nature of the fields of science, but I’m glad I did. The thought of working with two of my passions, astronomy and computers, excites me and GSoC with AstroPy fits perfectly in making this a reality. I plan to pursue computational astrophysics and astronomy as a career. Let’s say GSoC added a pretty stepping stone to reach there.
Read about Aarya’s project, Astropy : A mixin protocol for seamless interoperability.
Adeel Ahmad is a 3rd year student at National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences, Islamabad; his hometown is Islamabad, Pakistan. This is his first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with Astropy?
I have always been greatly interested in astronomy. Having experience in computer vision, this project seemed liked the perfect fit for me. Apart from this, open source software philosophy is something I deeply believe in, and working on this project will help realize my dream of creating a software that will be used on a mass scale; in this case by the folks at CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg and other astronomers.
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
My short-term career goal is to become a long time contributor to a well-reputed open source project. I have been working as a freelance full-stack web developer for about a year now. In addition to this, I also love traveling and working remotely will help me achieve this. However, I eventually want to shift towards a managerial role and work on team projects. The GSoC project will help pave the way and will enable me to make connections with the open source community.
Read about Adeel’s project, HiPS client for Python.
GSoC with SunPy
Nitin Choudhary is a 2nd year student at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur; his hometown is Deoghar, Jharkhand, India. This is his first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with SunPy?
I am hooked to open-source software development, an ambitious outgrowth of my personal interests to create free and open-source software. Having a lot of interest in astronomy, I wanted to apply my skills in this field, since I didn’t get a chance to work on a project before, which is even remotely connected to astronomy. This was a golden opportunity for me to combine my development skills to astronomy, and develop something good! And here, I am!
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
For now, I am graduating studying Mathematics, and I would like to apply this, especially Machine Learning in the fields of space research. This GSoC project acts as a stepping stone, to something big and new, where, I want to apply the skills I have acquired in space research and its related software development.
Read about Nitin’s project, Drms module for JSOC Downloads and follow along with his progress on his GSoC blog.
Ankit Baruah is a 4th year student at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur; his hometown is Tinsukia, Assam, India. This is his first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with SunPy?
The project looked interesting and being involved with sunpy for some time, it was a good way to give back something to the community.
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
The project looked like a good way to have a better understanding of how a new project get’s designed and structured. The challenges faced by the developers in starting a project. Getting the users involved (which in my opinion is the hardest part). Planning to be a software engineer and a open source developer in my free time. 🙂
Read about Ankit’s project, IRIS Data Class and follow along with his progress on his GSoC blog.
Punyaslok Pattnaik is a 3rd year student at International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad; his hometown is Bhubaneswar, India. This is his second time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with SunPy?
I love programming, and SunPy’s database module project interested me a lot. Hence I took it up, even though it was a bit challenging at first. Plus it was a good entry point for me into open source. Lots of new things to learn 🙂
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
I would like to continuously improve my programming skills, and also it would be a plus if while doing that I contribute to projects which help a large number of people. GSoC enables me to focus and work on a project throughout the summer while learning lots of new things.
Read about Punyaslok’s project, Sun, Right now! and follow along with his progress on his GSoC blog.
GSoC with Shogun
Michele Mazzoni is a 4th year student at University of Pisa, Italy; his hometown is Cesena, Italy. This is his first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with Shogun?
I’m intrigued by computer science areas that intersect with math like machine learning, also I felt that I was spending too little time on coding during university years and I always wanted to get involved with open source. So I’ve chosen Shogun because, as well as satisfying these requirements, it offered a nice list of entrance tasks to get acquainted with the project
and detailed proposal ideas for GSoC (developers are very responsive too!).
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
I see myself as a software developer and my aim is to work on projects that match as closely as possible my interests, so I hope this experience will help me get more proficient at coding while working on interesting problems like those of machine learning.
Read about Michele’s project, Fundamental Machine Learning Algorithms.
Giovanni De Toni is a 3rd year student at University of Trento; his hometown is Valdagno, Italy. This is his first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with Shogun?
I always wanted to apply my skills to a real-world project, but I was unsure where to start and which field to choose. Later last year, I met Machine Learning thanks to some university courses and I immediately liked it. So, when I found Shogun, I decided it would have been the perfect place to start doing something concrete and useful for others.
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
One word. Research. Since I was I kid I’ve always wanted to be a “scientist”. I am a curious person, I like challenges and I always search for new ways to broaden my knowledge. For me, GSoC represents a good opportunity to sharpen my skills (like problem-solving, personal management etc.) which will be very useful for my future career (and it is also a lot of fun!).
Read about Giovanni’s project, Shogun Detox II: Codebase improvements and finalization of the new Tags and Serialization frameworks.
Olivier Nguyen is a 1st year student at University of Waterloo; his hometown is Montreal, Quebec, Canada. This is his first time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with Shogun?
I wanted to work on machine learning and on a practical application. This project allows me to do so and also share my experience through blogging and tutorial-like work. Finally, I get to work with great people from all around the world.
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
I’d like to work on applications that have a positive impact on people and that are preferably open-source. Working with Shogun gives me a taste of what it feels like to do both.
Read about Olivier’s project, Data Project – Patient Monitoring and Decision Support using Health Data and follow along on his blog.
WeiJie Lin is a 2nd year student at Nanchang Hangkong university; his hometown is Shangrao, Jiangxi, China. This is his second time participating in GSoC.
What motivated you to apply for GSoC with Shogun?
I love Machine Learning but we don’t have course about it in school, and I really want to know how these algorithms works exactly. Furthermore, I believe the best way to learn something is actually working on it.
What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?
I want to become a Machine Learning Engineer, use and design ML algorithms. Shogun as a powerful Machine Learning toolbox covering many machine learning algorithms, there are ton of things can use and learn. And the people in there are brilliant and nice, they willing to help people and get passion to make Shogun better. So Shogun is a perfectly place to start my career 🙂
Read about WeiJie’s project, The Shogun Detox2.