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Google summer of code 2012 – and R – a call for students

Tal Galili
Google has again accepted R as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. R has successfully participated in GSoC in multiple previous years, and is excited to be returning this year as a mentoring organization. In a nutshell:  If you are a student looking to write some code for the R community, Google is willing to pay you $5000 for 3 months during this summer of 2012.  A good starting point is the R GSoC wiki. Interested students or mentors are encouraged to discuss other project ideas on the gsoc-r Google group. Note that GSoC is about coding.  It is not intended to fund research; but many activities with R require code to advance our work, so the program can be very helpful to improving R. The application process opened today (March 26th), and successful applicants typically post a draft application for feedback as soon as possible after the application period opens.  After the close of the application process, R project mentors will discuss and rank applications, and then request funding from Google for the best applicants and projects.

List of projects

Project Description
hyperSpec Improve R’s capabilities of working with spectroscopic and hyperspectral data.
Interactive Animations Make an animated, interactive plot to visualize high-dimensional time-series data
Image Labels Develop a framework for labeling plots using images instead of textual factor names
CRAN Stats Aggregate download statistics across CRAN mirrors to gain global view of R package ecosystem.
Interactive Web Graphics Allow the results of visualization analyses to be presented in the form of interactive applets on the web
Open Science Repository Interfaces Develop tools for visualization and exploration to enable broader practice of Open Science in R
KnitR Web extensions Extend the knitr package for better applications in the web so that web pages can be easily compiled
Finance: Bacon Performance Attribution Add portfolio performance and attribution functionality from Bacon to PerformanceAnalytics package
Finance: Advanced Risk and Portfolio Management Port Matlab code published by Attilio Meucci for risk and portfolio management to R.
Finance: Extend RTAQ Extend the RTAQ package with additional data interoperability and volatility measures.
Time Series: Extend xts Improve data subsetting approaches, visualisation, and data analytics for xts time series objects.
Disciplined Convex Optimization Implement an optimization modeling tool for R similar to CVX (Matlab) or CVXOPT (Python), and apply standard solvers in R. Alternatively, write an R package integrating the convex solver SeDuMi with R.
RMaxima Develop an R package interfacing the powerful and free Computer Algebra System (CAS) Maxima. The integration of Maxima with the Euler Toolbox will serve as paradigm.
Finance: Portfolio Performance Measurement and Benchmarking R code for Portfolio Performance Measurement and Benchmarking from Christoperson, Carino, and Ferson(2009)
   

Interested R community Mentors may also add additional project ideas, and student applications are not limited to the ideas above.

For information, the admins this year are Toby Dylan Hocking and John Nash, with Brian Peterson and Virgilio Gomez as backups. —————————- This post was collaboratively written by