GSoC decision process done
Ben Goertzel
We had about 50 applications and 9 slots, so choosing was really damn hard.
The 9 accepted proposals are here:
http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/opencog
Just for completeness, here is a list of some of the other proposals
that we ranked very high and really, really wanted to be able to fund
... but we just didn't get enough slots:
Caden Howell
Blake Lemoine
Patrick Lucas
Joe Doliner
Niels Last
Alejandro Weinstein
Alesis Novik
If you didn't get chosen this year, it doesn't mean we didn't like you
or your proposal. The choices were made based on a number of factors,
such as mentor availability, not wanting to have too many students
doing the same or very similar projects, perceived criticalness of the
project, and so forth. Every one of the non-chosen proposals listed
just above was GREAT (in our view) and well worth funding, and there
were many others that were also very good and well worth funding.
Probably 20-25 out of the 50 proposals we got really should have been
funded.
I wish we had a source of $$ to pay a bunch of the non-chosen students
to work on their projects this summer outside of the Google context,
but, such is not the reality ... the economy is crappy as we all know.
But if any of the non-chosen students have time and means to work on
their projects without Google sponsorship, even if part time, we'd be
happy to lend our support in terms of advice, encouragement, and so
forth.
And for those who will still be students in 2010, remember that the
*best* way to get chosen for GSoC 2010 is to make code contributions
to the project in the meantime. Of the 9 selected students this year,
3 are people who have already made significant contributions to the
OpenCog or RelEx codebase...
Thanks everyone for putting in the time to write your proposals. I've
written a lot of grant proposals in my life and probably gotten 10% of
them funded, so I'm well aware of the drag of writing proposals and
then not getting chosen, sometimes for complex reasons. Such is life
in this pre-Singularity era of scarce resources ;-p
Yours,
Ben Goertzel
OpenCog
--
Ben Goertzel, PhD
CEO, Novamente LLC and Biomind LLC
Director of Research, SIAI
b...@goertzel.org
Critical threshold: Being generally intelligent enough to be
disappointed by one's own lack of general intelligence