17:34 < paarth> Hi, I am a CS graduate student from IIT Roorkee. I am machine learning enthusiast and have implemented most of the learning algorithms in octave(Andrew Ng's coursera course :) ). I would like to contribute to this organization and have compiled and installed the library on my ubuntu system. I am going through trac documentation and also svn since i have mostly worked with git. I would highly appreciate some guidance/advice on what to start with..

17:51 < paarth> ignore the typos please

18:28 < naywhayare> Hi paarth, I can't find any typos :)

18:29 < naywhayare> have you looked through the tutorials? http://www.mlpack.org/tutorial.html

18:29 < naywhayare> maybe you can go through those to get a feel for the library

18:29 < naywhayare> and then you could look through Trac for an interesting ticket or implement a new algorithm entirely

18:30 < naywhayare> or take an existing algorithm and see if you can make it faster without breaking the tests :)

19:10 < paarth> thanks a lot!! .. I'll go through it :)

20:21 < karthikabinav> Hi, I am PhD student in Computer Science. I would like to understand the codebase of MLPack and start contributing to the effort.

20:22 < karthikabinav> I started off by installing ML Pack. I am not sure what kind of contribution you guys accept from outsiders. So wanted to get some idea about it

20:25 < naywhayare> karthikabinav: hello! what types of contributions are you interested in?

20:25 < naywhayare> we are always looking for more algorithms or improvements to existing ones :)

20:26 < naywhayare> have you taken a look through the tutorials? http://www.mlpack.org/tutorial.html

20:26 < naywhayare> maybe those are a helpful guide to using mlpack and getting used to it :)

20:28 < karthikabinav> I would like to start off with some smaller tasks that would help me understand the code base better. For long term, I am looking at adding more algorithms.

20:28 < karthikabinav> Yes, I was going through some of those tutorials to play around using mlpack

20:29 < naywhayare> ah, okay

20:29 < naywhayare> I am going afk for a little while... on a flight right now and we are about to take off (whee!)

20:29 < naywhayare> once it's in the air I'll have wifi and I can answer your question better

20:30 < karthikabinav> yeah sure .. thanks !

20:54 < naywhayare> okay, back

20:54 < naywhayare> there are some bugs on Trac: http://trac.research.cc.gatech.edu/fastlab/

20:55 < naywhayare> you might be able to find a bug there that you have the background for. many of the bugs are complex, so if something is unclear about them, you can post a message here in IRC or on the mailing list or on the bug itself to get more information

20:58 < karthikabinav> I have a sort of naive question. But is there a priority for the various bugs ?

20:58 < karthikabinav> In other words, are you looking at some bugs to be fixed as soon as possible, while some other bugs to be fixed possibly at a later point

21:01 < naywhayare> hm, most of the bugs do have a 'priority' field and also a 'milestone' field

21:01 < naywhayare> the more urgent bugs will be defects, not feature requests

21:01 < naywhayare> let me see if I can find any that are very important right now...

21:08 < naywhayare> I'd say #372 is of reasonably high priority; #330 is medium priority; #360 is reasonably high priority but I don't have the setup to test it (the first step would be reproducing the issue)

21:08 < naywhayare> I have two more bugs to file today, which will both be high priority, but I'm not sure either will be easy :(

21:10 < karthikabinav> I see .. I would have a look at one of #372, #330, #360 and see what I can do there ..

21:12 < naywhayare> often we don't have bugs that are easy places to jump in, unfortunately, but I hope one of those is a decent starting place, and if not, I am happy to help you through the process

21:13 < karthikabinav> sure thanks.. I guess I will dig through one these and get a hang of the code. Is it a good idea to post on IRC if I am stuck somewhere, or need help or would you prefer the mailing list.

21:14 < naywhayare> hm, it doesn't matter really; it's up to you

21:15 < naywhayare> there might be a bit of lag associated with IRC... I am always in the channel but not always at my desk :)

21:15 < karthikabinav> sure. great !