[Rd] Google Summer of Code 2009

[Friedrich Leisch]

Hi,

in approximately one months time mentoring institutions can propose
projects for the Google Summer of Code 2009, see

  http://code.google.com/soc/

Last year the R Foundation succesfully participated with 4 projects,
see http://www.r-project.org/SoC08/ for details.  We want to
participate again this year. Our project proposals will be managed by
Manuel Eugster (email address in CC). Manuel is one of my PhD students
and mentored the Roxygen project last year. This mail is mainly
intended to make you aware of the program, Manuel will send a followup
email with more technical details in the next days.

In this phase we are looking for potential mentors who can offer
interesting projects to students.  I don't think that we will get much
more than 4-6 projects, so don't be disappointed if you propose
something and don't get selected.

There are two selection steps involved: (a) The R Foundation has to
compile an official "ideas list" of projects, for which students can
apply. Last year we had 8 of those. After that, we (b) get a certain
number of slots from Google (4 last year) and all prospective project
mentors can vote on which projects actually get funding.

Currently we are looking for good ideas for phase (a). I give no
guarantees that all ideas will get on our official ideas list, what we
pick depends on the number of submissions and topics, respectively. We
want to make sure to have a broad range of themes, it is unlikely,
that we will, e.g., pick 10 database projects. Also keep in mind that
students have only three months time. This is not a research exercise
for the students, you should have a rough idea what needs to be done.

Last year we had a majority of "infrastructure projects", and only few
with focus on statistical algorithms. We got a lot of applications for
the latter, so don't hesitate to formulate projects in that
direction. Important infrastructure may get precedence over
specialized algorithms, though, because the whole community can benfit
from those. But that will be a decision in phase (b), and we are not
there yet.

Please don't send any ideas to me right now, wait for the above
mentioned email by Manuel on the technical details for idea submission.

Best,
Fritz

-- 
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Prof. Dr. Friedrich Leisch 

Institut für Statistik                          Tel: (+49 89) 2180 3165
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität                  Fax: (+49 89) 2180 5308
Ludwigstraße 33
D-80539 München                     http://www.statistik.lmu.de/~leisch
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