Google Summer of Code

Crunch time is here! Our participation in Google’s Summer of Code program has accelerated release schedules and shifted priorities. Ben is busy writing initial documentation, converting much of it from Novamente documentation. Gustavo, Senna and Linas are working to tidy OpenCog code, removing crufty and embarrassing bits and improving infrastructure and interfaces. Joel is working on the first collection of research-oriented MindAgents. You’ll hear more soon on this blog from these team members, and from GSoC students on the OpenCog Collective blog and the new list opencog-soc@googlegroups.com.

To quote Ben Goertzel’s post on opencog@googlegroups.com:

The Google Summer of Code selection process is done, and 11 proposals were chosen.

It was a really painful process to go through, as we had more than 70 applications, and at least 25-30 of them were really quite good.

The accepted proposals span a fairly wide variety of areas, and the choices were ultimately made based on a number of factors including

— clarity and completeness of the proposal
— background of the student
— readiness of the OpenCog codebase for the project
— critical-ness of the project for OpenCog

Of the 11 selected, 2 were for OpenBiomind projects, and the other 9 for OpenCog proper … including a bunch of stuff for the RelEx NLP toolkit.

There was a strong bias toward proposals dealing with improvements to OpenCog-related software components that already are moderately mature, like RelEx and MOSES.

Next year when OpenCog is more mature, if we are chosen to participate in GSoC again (as we hope, and have reason to somewhat expect), you can expect to see more explicitly, broadly, AGI-related proposals.

Anyway this list of selected projects is here for all who are curious:

OpenSim for OpenCog
by Kino High Coursey, mentored by Andre Luiz de Senna

Implementing a SAT/SMT Based Link Grammar Parser
by Filip Marić, mentored by Predrag Janicic

Bayesian and Causal Networks Inference using Indefinite Probabilities
by Cesar Augusto Cavalheiro Marcondes, mentored by Cassio Pennachin

Java GUI for OpenBiomind
by Bhavesh Sanghvi, mentored by Murilo Saraiva de Queiroz

MOSES: the Pleasure Algorithm
by Alesis Novik, mentored by Nil Geisweiller

Graph Algorithms for HyperGraphDB
by Guo Junfei, mentored by Ben Goertzel

Improved MOSES
by ChenShuo, mentored by Moshe Looks

RelEx Web Crawler and HypergraphDB Manager
by Rich Jones, mentored by David Hart

RelEx: Learning Simple Grammars
by Elizabeth Dawn Alpert, mentored by Lukasz Kaiser

Distributed HipergraphDB Version
by Costa Ciprian, mentored by Borislav Iordanov

Recursive Feature Selection for Enhancing Genetic Disease Prediction
by Paul Cao, mentored by Lucio de Souza Coelho

Many thanks to all who applied, all who agreed to help mentor … and especially to David Hart for coming up with the idea of applying for SIAI to be included as a mentoring organization in GSoC, with a focus on OpenCog work.

We’d also like to thank the terrific Open Source team at Google, particularly Leslie Hawthorn, Dave Anderson and Chris DiBona, for their patience and good advice.