User:AbKDs

A: An introduction

• A highly motivated and enthusiastic person , who loves to code random stuff . A jolly natured guy who loves to interact with people . I am currently pursuing my undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering ( III year ) from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee .
  • I can speak fluently in English and Hindi and I know intermediate level of Japanese as well
  • I have a background in Electrical Engineering . I have done courses on machine learning , neural networks , control theory and power system analysis .
• I am interested in coding and good in mathematics , I can contribute towards octave and implement more stuff on it so that it surpasses MATLAB .

• I first heard about Octave through the Andrew NG course on ml on coursera , then I saw that octave with such little requirements ( compared to MATLAB ) is as powerful as MATLAB . Octave involves a lot of mathematics and I feel it would be great to work on such a project .

C: Contact

• trafalgar is my nick on Octave IRC channel.
• My time zone is UTC + 5:30. I live in India .
• I usually code between UTC 13:00 to UTC 21:00 , but on weekends I can start as early as UTC 9:00

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 have used Matlab and Octave for about a year and a half . I know the basics of Python and Java . Used octave on windows previously , its been almost a month I am working with Linux Systems ( Ubuntu in my case ) , and now I am acquainted with DVCS ( mercurial , git ) along with autotools .
• I have an experience of working in C++ for almost the same time
• No , currently I haven't had any experience of doing any open-source project . Hopeful to change that in the upcoming days .
• I am into my junior year , I have not done any "big" projects yet but yes I have done various projects of medium scale . I designed a (i) recommender system for rating of movies (ii) a hand written digit-recognition system (iii) a RISC based MIPS pipelined processor .
• Currently I have not commited any code but I have with me code of various Power System Analysis methods ( GSLF , NRLF etc ) also some optimization algorithms ( like genetic algorithms etc ) which I hope to submit in the coming days .

F: Feeling fine

• • I am feeling fine in using IRC and mailing lists , got to discuss a lot on IRC which helped me .
  • Learning the basics of git and mercurial .
  • Currently learning mediawiki
  • comfortable with autotools , autoconf , automake etc .

• I am highly amazed by how open-source software can help the community , my main motivation is to make octave better than MATLAB . I want to actively contribute to it even after GSoC , hopefully the more I will come to know about a particular field where Octave ( as a scientific tool ) is useful , I will contribute by adding that functionality to octave .

O: Only out of interest

• I first heard about Octave through the Andrew NG course on ml on coursera .
  • I use a lot of Octave for my projects ( ongoing ) . I am currently working on a project to implement quantum neural networks ( apparently MATLAB has no tool for qnn ) . As soon as it is done I will submit the patch .
  • The best place to advertise is through online courses . Students in colleges attend a lot of MOOC . It is the fastest way to reach the academic community .
• I had a lot of problem in building the octave from the development sources . Even on the wiki page the information is pretty vague . But with the help of people from IRC , I was able to do that .

P: Prerequisites

• I have a system installed with both Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and Windows 7 .
• Time I will be access every day an
  • an internet connection is about 12 hours
  • a computer for 24 hours a day .
• I am the administrator of my system , so I have no problem in installing new software to my system .

S: Self-assessment

• I am a guy who prefers more to listen than to speak , I love to here constructive criticism which ultimately benefits .
• How autonomous are you when developing? If you answer both subquestions with "Yes, definitely", we are a tad confused. ;-)
  • Do you like to discuss changes intensively and not start coding until you know what you want to do? (YES)
  • Do you like to code a proof of concept to 'see how it turns out', modifying that and taking the risk of having work thrown away if it doesn't match what the project or original proponent had in mind?(NO)

Y: Your task

• Did you select a task from our list of proposals and ideas? (YES)
  • If yes, what task did you choose? Please describe what part of it you especially want to focus on if you can already provide this information. Please also wiki-link the page for your elaborated proposal here.
• I can start roughly from the first week of May , till the last week of August . I have summer vacations from May to the mid of July . Preferably will like to have my mid-term evaluations by the mid of June .