GSoC 2012: Regarding Project Idea: "Neurobiological data analysis"

[Abu Zaher Faridee]

Hi there everyone,

I'm Abu Zaher Md. Faridee, a masters student from Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology (BUET). I'm interested in working on OpenBiomind especially on the idea listed as "Neurobiological data analysis".

The reason I'm interested in this idea is because I find it very interesting and a bit similar (in approach only) to the thesis work that I did during my undergrad research. To be specific, I researched on reverse engineering gene regulatory networks from time series microarray data by using different meta-heuristics techniques like ant-colony optimization, artificial immune systems etc. I also had the chance to study some of the state of the art algogirthms for gene regulatory network reconstructions as part of my thesis work. Coming out of a pure computer science background and not from a biological science background, I had to learn a lot of things in this on my own. While this is not exactly the same as the project idea of interest, I find the similarity of applying learning algorithm in biological data one of the interesting points.

I have been involved with Google Summer of Code since 2009. I've successfully participated in GSoC2009 in Apertium, where I worked on developing an English-Bengali machine translation system, I field I find equally interesting and challenging. I contributed to the Apertium community later year, working on an experimental virtual machine implementaion to speed up some of the core engine attributes. I returned to Apertium in 2010 as a mentor in GCI, and later as a successful Mentor in Google Summer of Code 2011 for extending the same project that I contributed in 2009.

I'm fluent in Java, C++ and Python, have my fair share of shell scripting, awk/sed experience while working in previous GSoCs, have good understanding of popular machine learning algorithms like neural networks that I learned as a part of my courses and GSoC and I believe I'm a quick learner. I primarily prefer working on Linux/Mac OSX platform, but I could also work in Windows.

I'm been going through the links from the idea page. I've been running OpenBiomind in my pc and trying to understand it's workings for a while. But I'd like to know a bit more about this project idea in more details. Also I'd like to know, if there is any evaluation/coding involved during the application period, I did not find any coding challenge related to particularly this project idea. If there is anything, then please let me know so that I can get to it as soon as possible. It would be nice to know, if you guys have a dedicated IRC for openbiomind or is it ok to ask openbiomind related questions in #opencog, let me know.

Looking forward to hearing from you guys soon.

Thanks in advance.

Abu Zaher Md. Faridee

http://zaher14.blogspot.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/apertium/