Week 1 : Acceptance and Community Bonding

Introduction

My name is Aishwarya Harpale and I am a Senior year Computer Engineering student from Pune Institute of Computer Technology, Pune. I was selected for GSoC 2020 to contribute to the Open Source Organization — LibreHealth.

The project that I will be working on is “Low Powered Models for Disease Detection and Classification for Radiology Images”. I will explain a bit about my journey until now.

Pre-GSoC Period

After the organizations were announced, I began looking for projects that came under the category of Machine Learning. LibreHealth’s projects caught my eye and I felt that I could contribute to those projects using my knowledge.

As students, we were asked to develop a Proof of Concept(PoC) so that the mentors could evaluate our coding skills. I developed an application for Classification and Localization of Chest-XRay images. This application had a front-end developed using Bootstrap and it was deployed on a Flask server. For further details regarding this PoC, refer to my Github account.

I spent days and weeks, day and night implementing my PoC. Unfortunately, I was facing a lot of errors because this was around the same time that Tensorflow had updated from 1.x to 2.x. This Tensorflow dependency had resulted in a multitude of errors in my code. Solving them was such a tedious task that it took away my hunger and sleep. I had revised my code more than 6–7 times only to land myself in another heap of errors. With the help of multiple contributors on Stack Overflow and Github (and with a bit of dash of luck), my PoC was executing successfully.

Application Period

During this period, I refined my PoC and updated it so that it was up to the mark. I began writing my proposal and I left no stone upturned to show the mentors about my capacity as a contributor. I asked the mentors to review my proposal and inculcated as many changes as I could. I also asked my ex-GSoC friends to review my proposal so that they could guide me about the best practices to use while writing. In my proposal, I included as much of the research that I had performed while developing my PoC as this was a research project. This was the same time around which Covid-19 had just hit India. So while designing my timeline, I gave myself enough time to adjust my examinations as well as any uncertainties that might arise.

Proposal Accepted

On the day the results were going to be announced, I was sure that I was not going to be accepted. I was extremely nervous and decided that I will not check the results till later. As I was scrolling through YouTube, I received a notification that I had been mentioned in a post by one of my mentors on the LibreHealth forum. I held my breath as I opened the forum and ended up releasing a sigh of relief as I found that my proposal had been accepted. I was happy that my efforts came to fruition.

Community Bonding

The community bonding period began with everyone introducing themselves. My project specifications have altered a bit and I will write a complete description of my project in my next blog post. For now, I am reading more about Quantization and Pruning for Model Optimization and look forward to implementing these concepts during the course of my coding period.

I want to thank my Google and my mentors at LibreHealth for selecting me and giving me the opportunity to use my skills to contribute to Open Source. I will be posting weekly updates over here regarding my project and its progress.