User:Yayan: Difference between revisions

== A: An introduction ==

My name is Brayan Stiven Zapata Impatá and I am a native Spanish speaker, but I am also proficient in English. I am currently a PhD student in robotics and machine learning at University of Alicante, Spain. My background includes a Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering, specialized in computer vision and artificial intelligence, and a Master's degree in Computer Engineering.

My desire in taking part of the GSoC is driven mainly by a need of developing further my programming skills as well as working on a real open project. I have been working on many private researches and, although research is carried out with the idea of helping grow our society, it is usually very jealous of sharing. This is my first time participating at GSoC but I hope to learn a lot from it!

On my very first day at college when I began the journey to get my Bachelor's degree, what I was firstly introduce to was Octave. Some time has passed but I still find the Octave project a quite useful resource, I did even use it for my Bachelor's thesis. Since I feel in debt with this tool and its community I want to give it some of my time and knowledge in return.

== C: Contact ==

My IRC nickname is '''yayan''' and my e-mail address is brayan.inf@gmail.com

My time zone is UTC+1 and it will not change during GSoC.

Being sincere, since I am currently on a PhD program my work load is very unstable. However, I plan to work on GSoC from 07:00 to 10:00 and 17:00 to 21:00 during the weekdays. Anyway, I am very flexible and surely the excitement of working on this will lead to many more hours even on weekends. I've been working in a private company and at the same time carrying my Master studies through a year and a half so I am quite good at managing my time.

== E: Coding experience ==

This part is one of the more important ones in your application. You are allowed to be as verbose as you want, as long as you stay on topic ;-)

I've been coding in C/C++ since I was in high school and I keep writing C++ code every day. As an example, during the last term of my Bachelor's degree I developed a machine learning toolkit paring with some of my classmates. I was in charge of writing the implementation of Support Vector Machine using Gaussian kernel, a Genetic Algorithm with some self-created mutation operators, the k-Means clustering algorithm and a cross-validation method. Then, I used this toolkit to create a broker bot that could predict movements in the stock market.

Regarding Octave/Matlab, as I said before I've been using m-scripts for 6 years now and my Bachelor's thesis was written solely in this tool. This principally consisted on writing preprocessing functions for treating medical signals and then implementing the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm to optimise the training set used for a machine learning model. I have also used it to execute simple filters over images. Nowadays I keep using it as a prototyping environment. Finally, I once took a 4-hours-course at college to learn about OpenGL but I don't have further experience with it nor Qt.

I have experience working with Python 2.7.6. For my Master's thesis I created an open tool for open research data reutilisation and the scripting was whole written in Python. These scripts mainly used libraries like matplotlib, numpy and pandas. In addition to that, Tensorflow was utilised through its Python API so I could implement a simple logistic regression model. As a side project, just for the sake of learning, I once used Python and Keras (over Tensorflow) for building a cat/dog images classifier training a Convolutional Neural Network.

I do also have experience with Java, although I don't use it frequently. The same could be said about Scala, Go, R and FORTRAN that have used sporadically.