Xapian GSoC 2014 Projects

Accepted GSoC students were announced on 21st April, but I was away on holiday last week, and have only just had a chance to write up a blog post about this.

We received 30 student proposals for Xapian this year, and Google allocated us six slots (the same as we had in 2012).

We had four particularly strong proposals for the "Learning to Rank" project idea, so we decided to create a second project adding more algorithms, to complement the project sketched out in our ideas list.

Congratulations to the chosen six:

• Aarsh Shah: Performance/Relevancy testing module and optimization of DFR
• Assem Chelli: Arabic Support & Python Bindings Improvements
• George Daniel MITRA: Clustering of search results
• Hanxiao Sun: Learning to Rank (more algorithms)
• Jiarong Wei: Learning to Rank
• Shangtong Zhang: Posting list encoding improvements

Sorry to those we weren't able to select this year - we had to make some difficult decisions during the selection process, and we really appreciate the time you spent writing your proposal, working on patches, and on the rest of the application process. We'd encourage you to remain involved with Xapian, and to apply to us again next year if you're still eligible for GSoC.

If any applicants would like some more specific feedback on their applications please just come and ask us.