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Toby Dylan Hocking edited this page Jan 10, 2022 · 2 revisions

Application

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

R is a large and complex software ecosystem involving a base system, several thousand add-on packages and a number of tools and information channels, mostly web-based. We expect to develop some R packages and enhance R’s web presence, as we have done in previous years with GSOC.

What would your org consider to be a successful summer?

We expect to have between 20 to 40 mentors on board and we would strive to have all contributors completing the program successfully.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

20+

How will you keep mentors engaged with their contributors?

The number of mentors will probably be the same as in previous years, between 20 and 40 depending on how many project proposals are submitted.

We expect that mentors will be self-motivated to stay engaged with their contributors throughout GSOC. The main reason is that mentors volunteer their time to create project proposals on our wiki page, and they are usually looking for contributors to help write code, tests, and documentation for new or existing packages. One example from 2018 is Alex Drouin, who volunteered to mentor the successful Max Margin Interval Tree project, which implemented a machine learning model proposed in 2017 and originally coded in Python.

Finally we require each contributor/project to designate an “EVALUATING MENTOR” which will be held responsible for submitting the monthly contributor evals. Evaluating mentors who fail to submit evaluations will be penalized (e.g. not be allowed to mentor in future editions of R-GSOC).

How will you help your contributors stay on schedule to complete their projects?

We require that contributors provide a detailed timeline in their project proposals. Furthermore, we suggest weekly calls between mentors and contributors, so that contributors can ask for and get help with their projects.

How will you get your contributors involved in your community during GSoC?

Often our GSOC contributors are already involved via R User Groups, college or university courses that involve R, and the UseR! conferences. We will recommend that new contributors blog about their project on R-bloggers, and get involved with some of R’s many mailing lists.

How will you keep contributors involved with your community after GSoC?

R has many packages, and volunteer developers move among these from time to time. We would be happy to have contributors stay with the overall R family rather than insist they stick with the particular package that they develop for GSOC.

In the past, we have had many GSOC contributors stay involved in the R community. For example, several former GSOC contributors (e.g. Ian Fellows, Susan VanderPlas, Carson Sievert) have returned in subsequent years to become GSOC mentors. Also, Yixuan Qiu was a contributor in GSOC2011 and has set up an R user group at his home institution in Beijing. Another example is Qin Wenfeng who coded re2r in GSOC2016, and is now the primary maintainer of https://rweekly.org/ Another example is Marlin Na who coded the TnT interactive genome browser R package in GSOC2017, and proposed a new project about symbolic computation for GSOC2018. Finally, Vivek, Vijay and Narayani participated in GSoC as contributors and now are admin/mentor(s).

Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org in Google Summer of Code before?

Yes

Which years did you participate?

2008-2020

How many contributors did your org accept for 2020?

20

How many of your org’s 2020 contributors have been active in your community in the past 60 days?

15

For each year you have participated, provide counts of successful and total contributors.

Historically we have had very few failures. For example in 2011 we failed 1/14 contributors and in 2012 we failed 1/16 contributors. In 2013-2016 we instituted a policy of at least two mentors per contributor, and we saw the failure rate drop to zero, even though there were more contributors than ever (24 in 2015, 22 in 2016). In 2017-2019 we had to fail a few contributors who decided to do full time jobs or summer course loads instead of GSOC. In 2020 we had all contributors completing the program successfully.

If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years:

NIL

What year was your project started?

1993

Where does your source code live?

Most packages are developed on GitHub (under their authors’ accounts) and then submitted to CRAN for releases and official distribution https://cran.r-project.org/ The base R source code is also distributed on CRAN.

Is your organization part of any government?

No

Anything else we should know?

R is an official part of the Free Software Foundation’s GNU project, and the R Foundation is a not-for-profit organization working in the public interest. It has been founded by the members of the R Development Core Team in order to

  1. Provide support for the R project and other innovations in statistical computing.
  2. Provide a reference point for interacting with the R development community.
  3. Hold and administer the copyright of R software and documentation.

Profile

URL

https://www.r-project.org/

Tagline

R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics

Logo

https://www.r-project.org/logo/Rlogo.png

Primary open-source license

GPL-2

Org Category

Programming languages and development tools

Technology tags

r-project, c, c++, fortran, javascript

topic tags

data science, visualization, statistics, graphics, machine learning

ideas list

https://github.com/rstats-gsoc/gsoc2021/wiki/table-of-proposed-coding-projects

Short description

R provides a wide variety of statistical and graphical techniques, and is highly extensible. R is often the tool of choice for research in statistical methodology.

Long description

R is an integrated suite of software facilities for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. It includes

  • an effective data handling and storage facility,
  • a suite of operators for calculations on arrays, in particular matrices,
  • a large, coherent, integrated collection of intermediate tools for data analysis,
  • graphical facilities for data analysis and display either on-screen or on hardcopy, and
  • a well-developed, simple and effective programming language which includes conditionals, loops, user-defined recursive functions and input and output facilities.

The term “environment” is intended to characterize it as a fully planned and coherent system, rather than an incremental accretion of very specific and inflexible tools, as is frequently the case with other data analysis software.

R, like S, is designed around a true computer language, and it allows users to add additional functionality by defining new functions. Much of the system is itself written in the R dialect of S, which makes it easy for users to follow the algorithmic choices made. For computationally-intensive tasks, C, C++ and Fortran code can be linked and called at run time. Advanced users can write C code to manipulate R objects directly.

Many users think of R as a statistics system. We prefer to think of it of an environment within which statistical techniques are implemented. R can be extended (easily) via packages. There are about eight packages supplied with the R distribution and many more are available through the CRAN family of Internet sites covering a very wide range of modern statistics.

R has its own LaTeX-like documentation format, which is used to supply comprehensive documentation, both on-line in a number of formats and in hardcopy.

Application instructions

  • 1. look for a project that needs a contributor on

https://github.com/rstats-gsoc/gsoc2020/wiki/table-of-proposed-coding-projects

  • 2. Each project should have “tests” contributors can complete to demonstrate

relevant skills. After completing at least one test, please post your test results to a github repo, and add a link to your test results on the wiki.

  • 3. Send an email to the mentors of the project. Include a link to your

test results, and explain why you are interested in the project.

  • 4. If the mentors judge that you are capable of the

project, then they will respond and help you to write a proposal to submit to Google. It should include most of the details from the project proposal wiki page, and additionally a detailed timeline that explains your plan for writing code, documentation, and tests.

  • 5. Once your mentors have proof-read your proposal, submit it to google

https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

Proposal tags

new package, existing package, visualization, machine learning, data cleaning, statistics, finance, optimization, reproducible research, bioinformatics.

Mailing list

Google Group [email protected]

General email

[email protected]

Blog URL

http://www.r-bloggers.com/

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