Re: sabbatical project

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Sat, Sep 13, 2008 at 2:02 PM, dbateman <address@hidden> wrote:
>
>
>
> thomas.l.scofield wrote:
>>
>>
>> Hello.
>>
>> I haven't contributed that much to Octave as of yet.  My main
>> contribution was to alter imread from its state in octave-forge so
>> that it would use the GraphicsMagick library, and to significantly re-
>> write imwrite so that it would use that same library, and so it would
>> become much more Matlab-like.
>>
>> While these things were fun, and helped me understand the Octave
>> culture and structure to some extent, I'm really more interested in
>> implementing mathematical algorithms and/or developing packages to do
>> state-of-the-art calculations for mathematical problems.  As a
>> college professor with enough years of service, I am eligible for a
>> sabbatical, approximately half of a school year (plus summers on
>> either end of the year) to work on some project I propose and deemed
>> worthy by my school.  I am seeking both advice and help.
>>
>> When it comes to advice, I would appreciate help with choosing a
>> package to work on.  I have done some work in imaging and am
>> interested in doing more, and in that vein I have thought it would be
>> interesting to work on packages of the following types: general image
>> processing (contributions to the image package), a package for
>> compressive sampling, a package for level set methods, and a wavelet
>> package; I believe the latter three would be new starts in Octave.
>> Having identified these possible packages, I'm afraid the standard
>> "work on what you are interested in" will not help me here.  What
>> would help is knowing whether packages like these are getting some
>> attention already, whether there would be much demand, and insight
>> into the dependency structure (i.e., I do not yet know enough about
>> level set methods to know if it would helpful to have a wavelet
>> package already in place).
>>
>> As for help, at my school a sabbatical proposal must be accompanied
>> by "a letter of endorsement from a scholar outside the college (i.e.,
>> a non-Calvin scholar or colleague who knows the relevant field of
>> scholarship, is familiar with the applicant's previous work, and is
>> in a position to assess both the importance of the proposed project
>> and the likelihood of its being brought to successful completion)."
>> I know a post at octave-forge would probably be better, since any
>> work on a package I do is likely to end up there, but I think only
>> people in the octave-maintainers list are going to be at all familiar
>> with the scant work I've done.  Do any of you feel qualified to write
>> such a letter?
>>
>> I'm afraid I'm putting this together rather late.  I have to have all
>> materials for the proposal submitted to college officials by Friday
>> Sept. 20 (1 week from today).
>>
>> Thomas L. Scofield
>> --------------------------------------------------------
>> Associate Professor
>> Department of Mathematics and Statistics
>> Calvin College
>> --------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>
>>
>
> Some of my thoughts and Jaroslav's about what the goals for 3.3 should be
> are in the thread
>
> http://www.nabble.com/forum/ViewPost.jtp?post=19182313
>
> Though Michael has also started in on classdef support, so I suppose that
> should also be considered a 3.3 goal. The only really mathematical subject
> there is the non-linear minimizers, though I think Jaroslav has started on
> that.

So far I have a working fzero and buggy fsolve (a complete m-file
implementation). I have decided to postpone this somewhat, because it
is an optimization-related project and thus related to our research
grant and thus I can devote some of my paid time to that.
Unfortunately, right now I have higher priority stuff to do at work.
I wouldn't mind collaboration; and even after I finish the
implementation there will be a lot of work left because I want to
contribute some intensive testbeds for optimization funcs (fsolve, sqp
etc) into Octave-Forge, probably into the benchmarks package.


> For the less mathematical tasks I still believe the tree walker
> evaluator class

This may not be the best place, but can you please clue me what a tree
walker should do?

> is the next big thing that is needed to get better
> acceptance of Octave as its a necessary step towards a profiler, a compiler
> and a JIT.
>
> Octave supports matlab mex files and so wavelab works fine under Octave, so
> its a little difficult to say that Octave needs a wavelet toolbox. As for
> other things, well I'd look for inspiration in missing toolbox or core
> functions. Check
>
>  http://wiki.octave.org/wiki.pl?MissingMatlabFunctions
>
> for the list of missing Matlab 2008a core function in Octave 3.0.1 with
> their current state with respect to 3,1.51+
>
> Regards
> David
> --
> View this message in context: 
> http://www.nabble.com/sabbatical-project-tp19463651p19469898.html
> Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.
>
>



-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz