GSoC aspirant - guruprasad hegde

Dear All,

I'm guruprasad hegde. I would like to contribute to Xapian through
GSOC-2018.
Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.

My Introduction:
I study MSc in Computer science at the University of Saarland. I finished
my 4th semester. Some of the courses I took include NLP, Information
Retrieval & Data mining, statistical learning. These courses helped me
develop the interest in information systems. I gained good experience with
programming by taking system-related courses.

What I have done so far as part of GSOC preparation:
 * I started my preparation couple of weeks back and have built the code
successfully.
 * I followed through the "Getting Started Guide", trying the examples and
look into the related code sometimes.
 * I had a look at bite-size projects and good first bugs and spent time
with few of them by looking at the related code. I will ask the
question/clarification in the corresponding thread.
 * The project 'Diversification of results' piqued my interest. I read the
survey paper. Now I have a basic idea about the multiple approaches.

Plan:
 * I will read the survey paper couple of times to grasp the approaches
presented, then read the main papers,  evaluate which one is suitable for
implementing in Xapian. I communicate about this very soon.
 * I found the recently added topic 'Math aware search' is also quite
interesting. I haven't read the literature posted yet, will do that.

Question to mentors:
*  Any suggestion/comment on how can I proceed with choosing between two
topics?

* Is it possible to make the GSOC work as part of my thesis work? I choose
a topic (diversification or math-aware search) and implement it in Xapian.
As part of research work, try to come up with any improvement.
This idea just crossed the mind, so I thought of checking the possibility.
Irrespective of this, I am interested in contributing to Xapian in this
GSoC.

Looking forward to discussing the project!

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Guruprasad hegde