This is the third in a series of blogs to introduce our GSoC students to the community. (first post, second post)

We’re pleased to introduce our GSoC students working on Julia, a NumFOCUS Sponsored ProjectJulia logo

Vaibhav Kumar Dixit

Parameter estimation for nonlinear dynamical models.

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: Indian Institute of Technology

Major/Concentration: Mathematics and Computing

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Durg, Chhattisgarh, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

NumFOCUS is easily among the biggest names in open source with an active and vibrant community. The opportunity to be associated with such a well established organisation was enough motivation in itself for me!

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I came across the topic while browsing through the last year’s GSoC projects, I found it lay exactly in my domain of interest namely, bayesian statistics and mathematical modelling. Once I came in touch with my mentor Chris I had an opportunity to delve deeper into the topic and I found it tremendously rewarding. I started working on the package DiffEqBayes.jl from December itself and slowly increased my knowledge and comfort level with the topic. Further realizing the impactful applications of this work in both industry and academia motivated me to apply for GSoC to work further in the area.

How did you get involved in open source software?

I came across open source in my freshman year and it blew my mind. The idea of being able to collaborate with tremendously accomplished people across the world and contribute to a project with actual applications and which I personally find useful motivated me to become an open source contributor.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I expect the summer to be a tremendously rewarding experience. I believe I have a great mentor and I will be able to learn quite a lot both in technical knowledge of my project’s domain and also how to collaborate effectively which I believe will be greatly beneficial for me ahead in my career.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I am mainly motivated by learning new things and being able to use that knowledge to output something substantial. I haven’t yet decided on what career path I want to choose but in any case I believe the kind of collaborative and learning experience GSoC provides will be essential in my career ahead.

Ayush Shridhar

Model Import, Export and Computer Vision in Julia

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar

Major/Concentration: Machine Learning in Julia

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Mumbai, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I found the areas NumFOCUS was involved in to be really intriguing. I was always interested in numerical computing and Machine learning.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

Machine Learning is my passion. I started exploring machine learning in Julia when I came across an article on Kaggle. The simple looking yet powerful code was what attracted me towards Julia. Doing a lot of work in just a few lines of code is something I find really interesting.

How did you get involved in open source software?

I had contributed to a few open source organizations over the past few months. My first interaction with open source software development was towards the end of my first year.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I think it’ll give me an opportunity to learn a great deal about open source software development.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I want to be a data scientist. Since my project is related to Machine Learning in Julia, this project will definitely give me a boost in this direction.

Pietro Vertechi

A modern tool for data exploration based on JuliaDB and WebIO

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: ITQB Lisbon

Major/Concentration: Neuroscience

Degree Program: Graduate

Hometown: Rome, Italy

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I’ve been following closely the Julia programming language in the past two years and I’ve found the language interesting and the community friendly and welcoming: GSoC seemed like a perfect opportunity to make more serious contributions to the Julia package ecosystem.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

In my field (neuroscience) it’s very common for researchers to try and build small GUIs to analyze their data. Julia already has powerful frameworks to manipulate and visualize data but building simple GUIs in a semi-automated way starting from a dataset is still harder than it needs to be. Given that several packages are being developed to build web-based apps in Julia, I became increasingly curious to see whether one can use this technology to provide simple GUIs for data analysis (available either locally or online).

How did you get involved in open source software?

I actually started contributing to open source in Julia with the StatPlots package for statistical visualizations. I noticed that an analysis I was doing all the time (and that was quite common in my field) could not be done in Julia with simple commands so I contributed it to the StatPlots package: the PR was merged after a lengthy review process which was extremely instructive.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

While I have some experience on making small contributions to open source projects, I expect to learn from my mentor and from the Julia community how to manage a larger project throughout several months. I’m also curious to learn about web-technology as, coming from a scientific background, I don’t have much experience with it. I would also like to use this opportunity to see if software development is something that I could do in the long term as a career option (potentially within non-profit organizations).

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I hope to be able to be at the interface between academic work and open source development. In my experience, it is common for researchers to write code in a rush for a publication and then not maintain it or document it afterwards, which leads to a lot of repeated work. My hope is to continue doing research within academia while at the same time be able to turn my work into maintained and documented open-sourced repositories for a larger public to use. While I have some familiarity with academic research already, I wanted to use the GSoC opportunity to see to whether I could do open source software development at a more serious level.

Jiawei Li

Improvements for JuliaNLSolvers

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: University of Nottingham Ningbo China

Major/Concentration: Economics

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Hangzhou, China

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I’m Economics undergraduate students with strong interests in coding and data science. I’ve been passionate about applying computational techniques towards social science problems but my university courses have little touch on it. So I learnt programming by myself and tried to find a way to improve my programming skills, for which GSoC provides great opportunities. Most GSoC projects involve “hardcore” software engineering which I’m not good at, but NumFOCUS has main concentration on scientific computing, which is a perfect choice for me.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I chose my project because Julia is a cooler language than Python or R and this project is related to my background and interests. My project is improving JuliaNLSolvers, which solves problems of optimization, system of non-linear equations and parameter estimation. All these problems are crucial for scientific computation and data science, especially solving system of non-linear equations is related to Economics research. And my mentor Patrick is an Economics PhD student who is very kind and shares a quite similar background with me.

How did you get involved in open source software?

This is my first time making contribution in open source community. I did use open software a lot but never thought that I could upload any codes. During the application period, I tried to solve an issue and found a bug from the codes, so I did some research, made sure there was really a mistake, made a fix, tested and sent a pull request. That is my first PR and first time making contribution to open source software.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

Learning a lot by solving problems, improving my coding skills and making things I’m proud of.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

My career goal is to be a data scientist or a Computational Economics/Social Science researcher. GSoC program gives me an invaluable chance to learn computational skills and prove that I made something great.

Matt Kelley

Speech recognition for the Flux model zoo

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: University of Alberta

Major/Concentration: Linguistics

Degree Program: Graduate

Hometown: Boise, Idaho, USA

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

My strongest motivation was NumFOCUS’s mission of supporting the development of open-source scientific computing tools. As I step into further and further into being a scientist, I believe more and more strongly that open-source software is integral to good scientific computing; without it, we have to deal with black boxes somewhere in the scientific process, which makes it harder to replicate studies and understand our results.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I’ve noticed that there don’t yet seem to be many accessible resources targeted toward novices getting into speech recognition with deep learning, so I want to try to fill that gap. Part of my research for my PhD centers on deep learning for speech recognition, so contributing a speech recognition model to the Flux model zoo seemed like a natural fit for me.

How did you get involved in open source software?

My first significant foray into open-source software was installing Ubuntu 8.11 Intrepid Ibex on my laptop in high school. I saw how powerful the idea of open-source software was then, and I was hooked. All the research software and scripts I write and release are licensed with open-source licenses because I want my research community to be able to benefit from the time I’ve invested in writing code and being able to see what my implementation choices were.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I’m expecting to come away from this experience with an even greater appreciation of open-source software. I’m also excited about learning first-hand how the open-source development community collaborates. Additionally, I look forward to getting to know some of the bright individuals in the Julia language community who are working on similar problems as me.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I would ultimately like to become a professor at a research university. I think working with the GSoC program will be a big boon for me because the academic job market is fierce, and successfully completing the program will demonstrate that I can work productively with remote collaborators, which is often done in academia. Additionally, though, I think completing the GSoC program with NumFOCUS will greatly inform my perspective as a researcher and push me to be more open with my own research.

Tejan Karmali

Enriching Model Zoo of Flux.jl

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: National Institute of Technology Goa 

Major/Concentration: Computer Science and Engineering

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Goa, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I came across Flux.jl in January. I liked the library as it was built purely in Julia and immediately started playing with it, building different Deep Learning models with it. Incidentally, there was a GSoC project to add more examples of models in the model zoo of Flux. As I always wanted to contribute to open source, I thought this is the best opportunity to get started with it.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I have been interested in Deep Learning since a long time now. I like reading articles about deep learning and keep myself updated with the latest research. This topic gives me a chance to implement various state-of-the-art models which have been created over past couple of years.

How did you get involved in open source software?

This is the first time I am contributing to the open source. When I first reached out to the community for help in patches, I found it very welcoming and helpful. This motivated to get started with contributions in the open source.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

By the end of summer I expect to have gained knowledge about what goes into building a machine learning library, how to work on a large codebase, and in depth knowledge about some deep learning algorithms.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I plan to pursue higher studies in the area of Deep Learning. My GSoC project provides me with a perfect platform to learn and implement bleeding edge DL algorithms, mentored by a community which is closely involved in AI research.

Yiannis Simillides

College/University: UCL

Major/Concentration: Scientific Computing

Degree Program: Masters

Hometown: Yeroskipou, Paphos, Cyprus

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

Having completed a Bachelors studies in Engineering and almost finishing my Masters in Materials Science, I have gained plenty of experience in research and experimental methods in science & engineering. However, these are not the fields that I want to stay in in the future. Rather, I am interested in exploring the applications of computer science and technologies in the fields of science & engineering. I am greatly interested in information technologies, and I believe that the successful application of IT and data-driven decision making in industry will bring about even more disruptive changes in the future.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I believe that my experiences with research and technical writing, and my detail-oriented personality make me very qualified for this GSoC project. This project requires someone with an eye to detail and a scientific mindset with experience in plotting, and I believe that I am an excellent candidate for this project.

How did you get involved in open source software?

Previously, I’ve only worked on private software and DIY projects for school and around the house. Recently, I worked on expanding a Python script which automatically measures my internet speed and complains to my ISP, which is visible on my GitHub profile. I am still very much a newbie in open source, but determined to learn!

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I expect to drastically improve my software development skills, as well as gain significant experience working in a software environment. I expect that these experiences will help me further on in my life as well.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

Eventually, I do want to move from academia towards industry, preferably working in a R&D setting. I believe that the knowledge in programming and especially the data analysis, presentation and technical writing skills I will gain from this GSoC project will come into great use in my future career.

Xingjian Guo

Native Julia Implementation of Exponential Runge-Kutta Integrators

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: New York University

Major/Concentration: Scientific Computing

Degree Program: Masters

Hometown: Jiangyin, Jiangsu, China

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I’m interested in contributing to Julia and the scientific computing field in general.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I have already used exponential integrators in computational physics, but open source implementations of them are not yet available.

How did you get involved in open source software?

This is my first time contributing to open source. GSoC is the reason I began to contribute to open source projects.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I wish to gain first-hand programming experiences in the scientific computing field and also get to know the julia community.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I intend to pursue a career in high performance computing/data analysis after finishing my masters degree. I think GSoC will be a valuable addition to my curriculum.

Avik Pal

College/University: Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur 

Major/Concentration: Aerospace Engineering

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I had been working with Julia for around a year. Even though the language is very powerful and has a growing user base I found that most people prefer to start off with something like Python( for Machine Learning). The only reason I could see was that there were not enough resources in Julia to help newcomers.The major motivation for me was to help others in the field of computer vision by developing the necessary neural networks which are already present in most of the developed deep learning frameworks.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I have been exploring the domain of Machine Learning for the past 9 months. And for the last 4 months my major focus has been in the field of Computer Vision using Deep Learning. Flux Model Zoo Project was directly inline with my present preference.

How did you get involved in open source software?

The first time I got involved in open source software was in December, 2017 during a winter camp organised by the Programming Club of our College.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I expect that after GSoC, I shall become comfortable in dealing with big codebases. I might become more proficient in dealing with Computer Vision Problems as I have never worked on them at this scale before. Also, I will be able to collaborate with others more comfortably.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I wish to pursue my Masters in the field of Machine Learning. GSoC will allow me to improve my coding skills and also give me a wide exposure to the field of Machine Learning which I am sure will help me in the years to come.

Arijit Kar

College/University: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India

Major/Concentration: Computer Science

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Surat, Gujarat, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I have always wanted to develop stuff that can be used by the community and NumFOCUS and GSOC have given such an opportunity. Also, I have enjoyed working in Julia quite a lot and I love to be able to contribute towards it.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

From my freshman year, I have been highly interested in the field of Computer Vision and have enjoyed experimenting with image processing codes. My project involves implementation of Computer Vision algorithms (Optical Flow and Object Tracking) thus I chose it.

How did you get involved in open source software?

I was introduced to open source by a friend. At first I was reluctant in contributing, worrying about whether my code was good enough. But the open source community is very helpful and the projects are challenging and interesting and thus my interest in open source has only grown ever since.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I am expecting quite a few things like working with large code bases and people with different coding habits and styles, interacting with many amazing people, etc

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I am really interested in working in the field of Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence

Sebastin Santy

Adding more data repository support to DataDepsGenerators.jl

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: BITS Pilani, Goa Campus

Major/Concentration: Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering 

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Vadodara, Gujarat, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my second time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I wanted to work with Julia for a long time and I feel that, doing GSoC is the best way to learn and use it at work.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

It is related to my research

How did you get involved in open source software?

I have been contributing to open source for almost 2 years now. My open source experience began with contributing to Mozilla’s Firefox, Treeherder, Bugzilla after which I subsequently worked with Bugzilla team for 1.5 years during which I also did my previous GSoC.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

To learn more about Data Mining (and Machine Learning in general) and also gain hands-on knowledge on working with Julia which is vastly used in my research area.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I intend to go for higher studies (for a PhD if possible). Yes, my reason to choose GSoC with Julia was specifically for this.

Benjamin Chu

Iterative Hard thresholding for Genetic Analysis

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: University of California, Los Angeles

Major/Concentration: Biomathematics

Degree Program: Graduate

Hometown: Taiwan

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

Friend and advisor encouraged me to

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

It is related to my research

How did you get involved in open source software?

My research is on open source software development

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

Become a god at programming

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

Get tenure, do the research I want to do. Maybe GSoC will be bonus points on my resume?

Sebastian Pfitzner

College/University: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Major/Concentration: Physics

Degree Program: Masters

Hometown: Berlin, Germany

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my second time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I’m interested in contributing to Julia and the scientific computing field in general.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I have already used exponential integrators in computational physics, but open source implementations of them are not yet available.

How did you get involved in open source software?

Started contributing to Julia when it was a very young language.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I wish to gain first-hand programming experiences in the scientific computing field and also get to know the julia community.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I intend to pursue a career in high performance computing/data analysis after finishing my masters degree. I think GSoC will be a valuable addition to my curriculum.

Eeshan Gupta

Guaranteed Root Finding and Global Optimization with Intervals

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India 

Major/Concentration: Computer Science

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: New Delhi, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

Julia is an amazing programming language, and I love the opportunity to be able to contribute towards it.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I’ve always been fascinated with Math, and my project topic is related to implementing methods from Math (Interval Analysis). That’s why I chose the topic. Also, Julia is an amazing community.

How did you get involved in open source software?

I’ve been contributing to open source before this as well. I was introduced to opensource by a friend, and have been in love with open source and the community ever since.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I’m expecting to learn a lot of new things, enhance my programming skills, and meeting a lot of interesting and amazing people.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I am not quite sure about my career goals yet, but I would love if it revolved around CS and Math.

Aditya Puranik

Julia package for Minecraft API

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: The National Institute of Engineering, Mysore 

Major/Concentration: Computer Science

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Chandigarh, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I have always been interested in numerical computation software. I was only a lurker at the IRC’s of open source software until I found Julia. Amazed by the speed I immediately dove in. The warm community answered my queries and helped me contribute. Contributing here seemed like a great way to get experience.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I felt that there is a huge amount of potential in this package(PiCraft.jl) and if we are lucky it could get a community of thousands of people within a few years. The work is also interesting and within my domain of expertise.

How did you get involved in open source software?

This is my first time contributing. Although I have previously lurked around in some IRC’s, opened some issues and wrote small patches, this is the first time I have contributed seriously spent hours on trying to resolve problems.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I am hoping for a successful project and hundreds of new users by the end of this year.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I am unsure of my career goals but am confident that the GSoC program will help me figure that out eventually. I have been introduced to a wonderful community where people from various areas of expertise are available to help me out. I intend to stay here and work under their guidance after the completion of GSoC.

Anthony Wang

College/University: RWTH Aachen University 

Major/Concentration: Materials Science

Degree Program: Masters

Hometown: Vancouver, Canada

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

Having completed a Bachelors studies in Engineering and almost finishing my Masters in Materials Science, I have gained plenty of experience in research and experimental methods in science & engineering. However, these are not the fields that I want to stay in in the future. Rather, I am interested in exploring the applications of computer science and technologies in the fields of science & engineering. I am greatly interested in information technologies, and I believe that the successful application of IT and data-driven decision making in industry will bring about even more disruptive changes in the future.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I believe that my experiences with research and technical writing, and my detail-oriented personality make me very qualified for this GSoC project. This project requires someone with an eye to detail and a scientific mindset with experience in plotting, and I believe that I am an excellent candidate for this project.

How did you get involved in open source software?

Previously, I’ve only worked on private software and DIY projects for school and around the house. Recently, I worked on expanding a Python script which automatically measures my internet speed and complains to my ISP, which is visible on my GitHub profile. I am still very much a newbie in open source, but determined to learn!

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I expect to drastically improve my software development skills, as well as gain significant experience working in a software environment. I expect that these experiences will help me further on in my life as well.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

Eventually, I do want to move from academia towards industry, preferably working in a R&D setting. I believe that the knowledge in programming and especially the data analysis, presentation and technical writing skills I will gain from this GSoC project will come into great use in my future career.

Sayan Sinha

College/University: Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur 

Major/Concentration: Computer Science and Engineering

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I have been using Julia for various machine learning projects in my university. I liked the ease with which I could get my code running, with minimal effort. But there were a lot of things which could be improved or were missing. So, I decided to contribute to Julia to make it suitable for my needs and more usable in general.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

Machine learning framework in Julia (Flux) made it easy to code, but its performance wasn’t that good in the presence of a GPU. Moreover, I had a desire to work on the internals of the package. Hence, after having a talk with my prospective mentors, I chose a project on GPU computing.

How did you get involved in open source software?

I have been using open source software for over five years. I was a mere user, but after coming to IIT Kharagpur, I explored various avenues in which I could be a part of the development process. I took part in Kharagpur Winter of Code 2016, a GSoC-like event to introduce students to open source. Since then, I tried to remain pretty active on GitHub, working on various open source projects and contributing to that of others’. I also became a part of the Kharagpur Open Source Society, where I got the chance to conduct workshops and seminars related to open source software development. Hence, by and by, my interest in open source grew in a significant manner.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I wish to learn how open source development takes place in the industry. Besides programming, I want to learn how to interact and bond with a community and communicate ideas effectively. I also wish to see Julia’s Machine Learning framework getting more popular because of my contributions.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I wish to pursue a career in research. Currently, I am exploring various domains under machine learning. GPU computing is a field pretty unexplored, and I take this opportunity to learn more about the same.

Soham Girish Tamba

College/University: National Institute of Technology Goa 

Major/Concentration: Computer Science and Engineering

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Panaji, Goa, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

I had no initial preference to NumFocus. While looking through a list of all the High Performance Computing projects in GSoC, I came across LightGraphs (My specific project) and decided I want to work on it.

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I was looking for a high performance computing project. LightGraphs.jl is a library that is looking to maximize performance for common graph algorithms so I thought it would be a good fit. Also I noticed the project admins of the resolve issues and pull requests quite quickly so I thought it would be a good place to work.

How did you get involved in open source software?

This is my first time contributing to open source.

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

Other than gaining practical experience in producing high performance code, I hope to meet people with career goals similar to mine that I can interact with even after the GSoC project ends.

What are your career goals, and how do you see the GSoC program moving you towards them?

I am interested in pursuing a career as a researcher in Theory of Computer Science. Some practical experience in high performance computing would be insightful.

Mikhail Viktorovich Vaganov

Tooling for N-body Simulations in Julia

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: Institute of Continuous Media Mechanics

Major/Concentration: Physics

Degree Program: Graduate

Hometown: Perm, Russia

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

What motivated you to apply for GSoC with NumFOCUS?

Julia community offered an idea connected with physics

Why did you choose your specific project topic?

I can create something useful for physicists

How did you get involved in open source software?

It is the first time I am contributing to an open source project

What are you expecting out of your GSoC experience?

I want to obtain more practice in implementation tools for fast physical simulations

Shubham Maddhashiya

Native Julia solvers for ordinary differential equations and algebraic differential equations

Link to Project Description

Link to Project Blog

College/University: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India

Major/Concentration: Ocean engineering and Naval architecture 

Degree Program: Bachelors

Hometown: Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

How many times have you participated in Google Summer of Code? This is my first time participating in GSoC

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