[GSOC2013] Collada Import

Sorry for the wrong subject. Now corrected.

Hello everyone,

      My name is Francisc Bungiu, and I am currently a third year
Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, Romanian and Hungarian student
at Jacobs University Bremen, Germany. I will be graduating in June and I
will continue my studies at ETH Zurich, in Switzerland, pursuing a Master
Degree in Computer Science.

       I have started working in C++ back in my high-school days, since I
studied in a informatics-mathematics specialization class. After my first
experience as a programmer, I have decided that I want to dive deeper into
this field, and hard work invested in the application process, I was
successfully rewarded with my admission in 2010 by Jacobs University
Bremen, into the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science program. This
major is one of the most demanding specializations on campus given its
interdisciplinary approach, whose objective is to connect the two fields in
one undergraduate program. During my first year, I acquired and
consolidated my programming skills by taking C/C++ and Matlab courses. My
conscientiousness, good time management, and pragmatic development allowed
me to get a place in the top 10% students of my university. I also took
several courses offered by the Department of Electrical Engineering, where
I have been introduced to the hardware notions that make computer
programming possible and subsequently helped me develop bridging
connections between the two segments. After my second year of bachelor
studies, I chose to focus on the Computer Science segment and therefore
took “Graphics and Visualization”, “Artificial Intelligence and “Image
Processing” as specialization courses. The solid background in these
subjects and the ones amassed before allows me presently to conduct
research for my Bachelor thesis on “Object-tracking in RGBD images”. The
topic experiments the possibilities and limitations of real-time object
tracking in the context of three-dimensional video frames, using all
geometric and color information available from a depth-registering scanner
such at the Microsoft Kinect.

        Within the context of my undergraduate studies, I got an internship
position in the summer of 2011 at the German Research Center for Artificial
Intelligence (DFKI) Bremen. I enjoyed working on the Hets project, which
provides tools for heterogeneous specifications. More precisely, I had to
implement the OWL2 logic using Haskell and Java programming. The
challenging nature of my assignments required critical thinking and
additional extrapolation on the high amount of new information I got in
contact with. In addition, the project entailed team work with the other
students involved and a close collaboration with the senior researchers.
The research-oriented environment I came in contact with motivated me to
apply for a research assistant position in the robotics group of Prof.
Andreas Birk from mu university. I was very happy to be accepted for this
position. The project I had to work on, RobLog, sought to extend the
already developed geometry-based approach to plane-matching, as to also
include other attributes like color or intensity of the points collected by
a 3D sensor. The tasks in this project heavily relied on C++ programming
and use of ROS, OpenCV and Boost libraries. The successful implication in
the robotics research group resulted in a paper publication, entitled
“Utilizing color information in 3D scan-registration using planar-patches
matching” by K.Pathak, N.Vaskevicius, F.Bungiu, and A.Birk, that got
accepted to the “IEEE International Conference on Multisensor Fusion and
Information Integration, 2012”.

         In my second summer, I decided to apply to several companies that
offered software engineer intern positions and after two favourable rounds
of interviews with Microsoft, I obtained a position at the Microsoft Utah
Development Center as a Software Engineer Developer. There, I got in touch
with the entire software engineering production cycle, starting from the
feature specification and design, to unit, integration, system and
performance testing. Thus, I had the opportunity to apply and test my
knowledge in the field and get involved actively and contribute to the
“Microsoft BitLocker Administration and Monitoring” project, with a great
impact on the companies that use this product. In addition, I was given the
chance to closely work with the entire development team, to participate in
their meetings, to consult with and get advice from more experienced team
members, thus enhancing my team-work skills.

        In addition to this, I have continued my work in the Robotics
research group of Prof. Andreas Birk: I have created a C++ library for
importing/exporting meshes and robot models to/from Collada, and I am
currently developing a GUI in QT for the actual object database with 3D
interactive marker support.

         I consider that in addition to my experience in C++ coding, my
eagerness to accumulate knowledge, cope with the challenges brought by an
open source project, and my excellent academic background, will be a
valuable contribution to the development of your project. For me, working
for "Crystal Space" would be both a call for using my abilities in a
stimulating effort and an exciting opportunity to further develop my
knowledge on the path to the future career in software development that I
dream of.

         This is my first time I am applying to Google Summer of Code and I
am looking forward to a positive experience developing open source code for
Crystal Space. Given my experience developing C++ code and developing a
lightweight Collada library in C++, I am mainly interested in the "Collada
Import" project. I have already checked out the svn version of the project,
compiled it from source code and started looking around the code. I would
like to kindly ask you to point me in the right direction of the code
repository to get acquainted with the segments this project will mostly
rely on.
         I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

Best regards,
   Francisc

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