GSoC 2015 application: Difference between revisions

Yes, we participated in GSoC last year independently (see above for details) and during 2011-2013 under GNU, for a total of 12 students who contributed to the Octave project through GSoC. Additionally, we have been a mentoring organization for the European Space Agency (ESA) Summer of Code in Space (SoCiS) through which we had 4 more students. Students working with us have made valuable contributions which are live and in our main source tree. These contributions covered many different areas, improving Octave's usability in functionality, from low-level instrument control and just-in-time compilation, to new algorithms for processing N dimensional images and least-squares spectral analysis.

The challenges are managing very diverse problem domains and finding people who are competent in all of them.  We have not had trouble keeping students interested, although we have seen lulls in their productive output at times, which were always thankfully remedied with a little prodding.

Summarizing, we have previously mentored a total of 16 students through different programs, all of them having successful experiences which created useful code for the project and community. Because of this, we believe that Octave is a suitable project for GSoC with the capability to mentor students and benefit from their contribution.