Google Summer of Code 2021 - Call for Proposals

This specific thing is likely too big for a GSOC.

Math library things are probably the most appropriate for GSOC. SOmething that comes to mind is implementing custom autodiff for a bunch of our forward mode stuff.

An advantage there is that we already test forward/higher order autodiff for most of our functions, so there’s a lot of work to be done there that already has a big support framework in place.

Also there’d be work implementing/cleaning up custom reverse mode autodiff stuff that is there.

I can’t promise I’ll have time in the Summer though. If I’m around, happy to help, but I get anxious about my name being on lists where there are expectations lolol.

@andrewgelman I recall you’ve mentioned a couple times in the weekly meetings that folks approach you with models that are slow; would you have availability/interest in joining the proposal to get some GSoC students to collect and optimize such models for inclusion in posteriorDB and benchmarking?

I know this question is addressed to Andrew, but responding anyhow - I don’t see the connection between helping folks rewrite and/or reparameterize slow models and posteriorDB. also thinking of the saying “give a person a fish / teach a person to fish”.

I would love to see a series of case studies showing how to reformulate a complex model that is fundamentally correct but is slow so that it takes advantage of the way that the Stan math and current architectures.

However, if the model is just another very complicated multi-level regression, it probably doesn’t need to be added to posteriorDB.

Ah, yes, it would be important to select candidate model/data combos that span an assortment of domains.

Yeah sure!

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I don’t have that data on hand and couldn’t find it with a cursory google search. NumFOCUS seems to put in an application every year and I confirmed they did participate in 2019 and 2018. Also Stan did participate in 2017 it seems. So I think NumFOCUS (and by extension, us) has a great shot at getting accepting as a member organization.

However, my understanding is that getting accepted as a member org doesn’t necessarily guarantee that a student will pick one of our projects. I think there’s some period where students look through options, reach out to member orgs to discuss the potential projects, and then make a selection. So getting students will in part depend on us writing interesting project descriptions.

I can say that I’d be interested in @mike-lawrence’s idea regarding the survey of models and updating the examples repo. I’m not too familiar with the details of the process, but I know you’d have at least one student applying (me) if that proposal makes the final cut.

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Sure, that would be fine. I don’t really know how summer of code works. But I’ve been meaning to draft this Bayesian Benchmarks paper so this could be a good motivator.

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I’m happy to help out. I can be a mentor. Although, there are some weeks during the summer I will not be available (a total of 4 weeks, spread out). But I guess that would be the reason of having multiple mentors?

I think this is a great idea. I think even me and @avehtari have a document on a similar project already laying around. Also we have the discussions with the Facebook and Google people on a set of benchmark models, so we have additional models from different domains listed there as well. I guess the most important step would be to get the scope not to be too large.

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Great! So with you and @andrewgelman we’ve met the 2-Dev-minimum (I’m happy to help supervise but I’m not an official Dev and certainly haven’t made any Dev-level contributions yet).

I’ll try to finish up my job-work quick today so I can start writing the proposal (deadline is in two days). I’ll share the doc link here when I start, but feel free to do so yourselves if you don’t want to wait on me

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Thank you! This is great. Being away shouldn’t be an issue I feel. The other mentor can be more active in those weeks as you suggest. Also you could meet ahead of time to be sure the student knows what needs to be done while you are away.

FYI @stevebronder suggested that we host the proposal on stan-dev/design-docs. I have a pull request open to merge on a proposal template I made. If anyone has review/merge authorization it would be great.

Maybe we all fork this, work on our individual portions, and merge.

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Thats great! Just send me a message with the link and I can try to work some tomorrow with it!

Thanks @stablemarkets !! I’ll try to setup the base for Lambert and the Garch stuff this weekend

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@mike-lawrence , will you try to setup a draft? Then I can go through it tomorrow?

Hi Everyone,

A lot of progress has been made towards our GSoC 2021 application. Thanks to all the project mentors for putting these proposals together so quickly. I’m really excited about these projects.

Stan proposals as well proposals from other NumFOCUS orgs can be found here:

NumFOCUS will take it from here and submit an application to GSoC by February 19. Selected orgs will be announced March 9. It seems NumFOCUS success rate is pretty good - they have been selected 6 out of the previous 6 applications. Let’s keep our fingers crossed 🤞!

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Great news everyone:

I have just been informed that NumFOCUS (and, by extension, Stan) has been selected for GSOC 2021!

Here is the profile: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/5765643267211264/

Next steps: During March 29-April 13 students will be registering and applying to mentor orgs through the GSoC site. If you know students who may be interested, now might be a good time to spread the word. As a reminder, here is the link to the Stan project descriptions: design-docs/proposal_main.md at master · stan-dev/design-docs · GitHub

I will reach out the mentors of the three proposed projects shortly with further info.

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Hi,

This is a query regarding GSOC 2021. This is my first time participating in GSOC.
I am interested in Bayesian Benchmarking project idea of Stan. How can I contact the mentors for guidance with regards to proposal, etc.

Best Regards.

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@anirudht glad to hear you’re interested, follow up in the thread here: GSoC 2021 - Q/A thread

Thank you so much for providing the link for the communication channel.