Introduction and Interest in Contributing to NumFOCUS

[Arnav Kulshrestha]

Hi NumFOCUS community,

My name is Arnav Kulshrestha, and I am a third-year student at BITS Pilani, Hyderabad campus. I would like to express my interest in contributing to NumFOCUS projects for GSoC 2026.

After exploring several sub-organizations under the NumFOCUS umbrella, I am particularly interested in QuTiP, Toqito, PyTorch Ignite, SciML, and Aeon. I am especially drawn to the scientific computing ecosystem offered by NumFOCUS, as well as other projects that involve Quantum simulating systems, quantum information and measurement, Python-based scientific machine learning libraries, and pipelines. As a dual degree physics student with technical interests in machine learning, they closely align with my interests and technical background.

I have previously interned at an AI and quantum technology startup, where I worked with core machine learning libraries, including PyTorch, TensorFlow, Keras, and Hugging Face. I am currently working on a research project that involves segmenting coronary arteries and predicting blood flow using physics-informed neural networks and Res-U-nets.

After gaining hands-on experience in core machine learning using core-ML libraries and quantum information and measurement using Qiskit and Cirq, I would like to expand my skill set in this domain by contributing to open-source projects.

I would greatly appreciate any guidance on how to start contributing to NumFOCUS or its sub-organizations. And how to reach out to mentors for more questions and guidance.

Best regards,

Arnav Kulshrestha

https://github.com/arnavkul-byte

https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnav-kulshrestha-56b754314/