This week all students who passed GSOC’21 were announced. That includes 21 student projects with mentors from the R project for statistical computing. Since 2012 I am an administrator for R project in Google Summer of Code (R-GSOC), and my job as an admin is to recruit mentors that propose coding projects, and then help mentors find students to work on those projects. I first heard about GSOC at the international useR 2011 conference in Warwick, from Claudia Beleites, who gave a talk and co-authored an R News article describing the experience, R’s Participation in the Google Summer of Code 2011. During the conference Claudia invited me to serve as administrator, so I began service as admin starting in 2012. So now it has been ten years, 2012-2021, wow!

When I began as admin in 2012 we were using the now-defunct RWiki for organization. Here is a list of projects 2008-2014. You can still look at the old wiki pages on the Internet Archive’s wayback machine,

Here is a list of the newer years (since 2015) on GitHub.

Now we use a GitHub wiki to organize. The most recently completed year is 2021, and you can post ideas for next year on 2022.

Since 2013 I have mentored various students in R-GSOC coding projects. Here are some of my R-GSOC mentorship success stories:

  • Anirban Chetia (India). testComplexity GSOC’20 and directlabels GSOC’21, new master student at NAU as of Fall’21!
  • Diego Urgell (Mexico City), BinSeg package, GSOC’21. Implements the classic binary segmentation algorithm which is useful as a baseline algorithm to run in my papers about new optimal changepoint algorithms, for example Labeled Optimal Partitioning and Linear time dynamic programming for the exact path of optimal models selected from a finite set.
  • Julian Stanley (MIT grad student), gfpopgui package. Graphical user interface for Graph-constrained optimal changepoint models, useful for experimenting with complex graphs as shown in the gfpop paper, etc.
  • Sanchit Saini, rtracklayer package, GSOC’20, but kept contributing long after GSOC was over.
  • Anuraag Srivastava (NAU master student), opart package, GSOC’19.
  • Qin Wenfeng (China), re2r package. Google’s fast and secure RE2 regular expression library.
  • Many students over the years, animint2 package. By far the best student who worked on animint was Carson Sievert who now works for RStudio, and has done a lot for interactive graphics in R.