Google Summer of Code 2021

It's about time for us to start thinking about projects we'd like to see at Turing.jl for the Google Summer of Code 2021! Below is a list of projects the Turing team would be interested in working with students on for the summer.

If you are interested in exploring any of these projects, please reach out to the listed project mentors. You can find their contact information at turing.ml/team.

MCMCChains improvements

Mentors: Cameron Pfiffer, Hong Ge

Project difficulty: Easy

Description: MCMCChains is a key component of the Turing.jl ecosystem. It is the package that determines how to analyze and store MCMC samples provided by packages like Turing. It's also used outside of Turing.

For this project, a student might improve the performance of the various statistical functions provided by MCMCChains, changing the back end to use a data storage format that maintains the shape of parameter samples, or improve the general plotting functionality of the package.

There's lots of fun little things to do for MCMCChains. Check out this meta-issue for more details and discussions.

Particle filtering methods

Mentors: Hong Ge, Cameron Pfiffer

Project difficulty: Medium

Description: Turing's support for particle sampling methods is slowing being improved with the addition of AdvancedPS.jl. If you're interested in implementing or improving particle sampling methods, this is a great project for you!

Nested Sampling

Mentors: Miles Lucas, Cameron Pfiffer, Hong Ge

Project difficulty: Hard

Description: NestedSamplers.jl is an excellent package which implements nested sampling methods. As of yet, it is not connected to Turing.jl. For this project, a student would connect the NestedSamplers.jl library to Turing.jl.

GPU acceleration

Mentors: Mohamed Tarek, Hong Ge, Kai Xu, Tor Fjelde

Project difficulty: Medium

Description: Turing's native GPU support is limited in that the Metropolis-Hastings and HMC samplers do not implement GPU sampling methods. This can and should be done -- GPU methods are awesome! If you are interested with working on parallelism and GPUs, this project is for you.

Students will work with the code at AdvancedMH or AdvancedHMC, depending on their interests.

Documentation and tutorial improvements

Mentors: Cameron Pfiffer, Martin Trapp

Project difficulty: Easy

Description: Turing's documentation and tutorials need a bit of an overhaul. Turing has changed significantly since the last time the documentation was written, and it's beginning to show. Students would use their knowledge of probabilistic programming languages and Turing to shore-up or rewrite documentation and tutorials.

Iterative Methods for Inference in Gaussian Processes

Mentors: Will Tebbutt, S. T. John, Theo Galy-Fajou

Project difficulty: Medium

Description: There has recently been quite a bit of work on inference methods for GPs that use iterative methods rather than the Cholesky factorisation. They look quite promising, but no one has implemented any of these within the Julia GP ecosystem yet, but they should fit nicely within the AbstractGPs framework. If you're interested in improving the GP ecosystem in Julia, this project might be for you!

Implement advanced variational Gaussian process models

Mentors: ST John, Will Tebbutt, Theo Galy-Fajou

Project difficulty: Easy to Medium

Description: Sparse variational Gaussian process models provide the flexibility to scale to large datasets, handle arbitrary (non-conjugate) likelihoods, and to be used as building blocks for composite models such as deep GPs. This project is about making such models more readily available within the Julia GP ecosystem - depending on your interests you can focus on making it easier for end users and providing good tutorials, or on the implementations of these models to give us the same or better performance as with established Python packages such as GPflow, integrating with Flux.jl, etc.