Re: [Banshee-List] A song and dance about GSoC 2012

["gnomeuser gmail com" <gnomeuser gmail com>]

2012/4/4 Udesh Liyanaarachchi <la udesh1987 gmail com>:
> I've written my initial stage of the proposal for Gsoc. As David and
> Alexander suggested I decided to apply it through GNOME. Please have a look
> and let me know your suggestions and comments. Deadline of the proposal will
> be 8th of April.
> http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2012/udesh/31002

Okay below a couple of changes you can consider.

Voice Control For Banshee
Udesh Liyanaarachchi (and I am dying to learn how to pronounce this btw.)

Short description: The idea is to add voice control for Banshee media
player to improve the accessibility. Many portable media player
devices can be controlled using the human voice and it has resulted in
the users having a rich accessibility interface. The plan is to let
the user do basic controls through his voice which will be helpful for
the people who can't use the normal mouse controls.

What is your e-mail address and IRC nick?
 la udesh1987 gmail com , udesh

Do you have a web page, blog, or microblog?
http://www.tecstuf.blogspot.com/

What is your academic background?
 I'm a final year research student at Department Of Computer Science
Engineering, University Of Moratuwa. In completing the course I have
been gone through object oriented concepts, data structures and
algorithms, software engineering, database, theory of computing,
computer security, compiler theory, etc.

What is the ultimate goal of your proposal?
The Banshee media player has become my favorite open source project
since starting my involvement last year. I actively started my
committing work to the project since January 2012. My final year
research project is voice analysis related, so I reasoned that
contributing voice controls would make the Banshee media player even
better and widen its reach and functionality while furthering my
academic goals.

What components/modules will the proposed work modify or create?
There would be two main components in the proposed idea.

1.       Getting the voice cut of the user and take the attributes of it.

2.       Feed the data to a neural network for classifying and pattern matching.

What benefits does your proposed work have for GNOME and its community?

Gnome has proposed that 2012 the year of accessibility. With the
advent of GNOME 3, Gnome has started down an exciting new path in
terms of usability, which will include users of all ages and
abilities. This drive is not only necessary for those with
disabilities but is also increasingly needed for our devices work for
any user. The GNOME accessibility team is working hard, but its
resources remain limited meaning not every application will receive
attention. So this project will be beneficial in covering an
application that would otherwise not be receiving special attention in
this area.

There is excitement in the Banshee community for the feature and a
mentor (Alexander Kojevnikov) has already volunteered for the project.

Why are you the right person to work on this project?

I have been registered in the developer mailing list since last year
April and following the discussions. I actively participated in
Banshee work since this year January. I successfully completed a GSoC
2011 project which was related to the Selenium organization. My final
year project also related to voice analysis which provides me with the
required knowledge and skill set to implement voice controls for
Banshee.

I would love to increase my knowledge and experience in developing
using GNOME components. This is a big project and thus carries a big
responsibility, but my existing qualifications, my record and the
pleasant interaction with the Banshee development team gives me
confidence that through hard labor I will rise to challenge and make
GNOME better for it. I am not afraid of hard work, I work well with
the Banshee community and have a driven determination to become a
valuable contributor to the GNOME project.

How do you plan to achieve completion of your project?

I would use IRC channel, email, gtalk and skype to have regular
conversation with my mentor and other valuable resource people. I’m
planning to give a schedule with dates and important
milestones/deliveries in two weeks increments. This would be plan
aligning with the timeline of GSoC program. I will also deliver
regular weekly updates on my blog to allow outsiders to follow my
progress (note to people in charge of planet.banshee.fm - it should be
on there).

Interim Period:

Mentoring organizations review and rank student proposals; where
necessary, mentoring organizations may request further proposal detail
from the student applicant.

             April 25:

Accepted student proposals announced on the Google Summer of Code 2011
site. Community

Bonding Period:

Students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to
begin working on their projects.

May 23:

 Begin coding for Banshee voice control. Extracting the attributes of
the voice input of the user.

               Interim Period:

Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects.
Share my implementation in the Banshee developer list and get the
review of the community. After getting the review do appropriate
changes.


( in between here June 26th to June 2th is the Hackfest, should
mention that you get a 5 day intensive face to face experience with
your mentor and key members of the Banshee and Mono community. In
general this time plan needs to be elaborated on I think)

July 11:

Mid-term evaluations deadline.

              Interim Period:

Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects.
Implement the neural network and feed the data extracted. Share the
implementation in the Banshee developer list and get the review of the
community. After getting the review do appropriate changes.

              August 15:

Suggested 'pencils down' date. Take a week to scrub code, write tests,
improve documentation, etc.

August 22:



Firm 'pencils down' date. Mentors, students and organization
administrators can begin submitting final evaluations to Google.

August 26:

              Final evaluation deadline

              August 29:

              Final results of GSoC 2012 announced


What will showable at mid-term [1]?
There would be main two components in the proposed idea.  For the
midterm I would like to extract the attributes of the input voice clip
of a user. So theses data can be fed into the neural network which
will be implemented as the second phase.

What are your past experiences with the open source world as a user
and as a contributor?
I successfully completed GSoC 2011 for Selenium organization and
involved in its work. After completing this year GSoC project I’m
planning to contribute to JBoss implementing a similar idea. I have
been involved in various open source projects Apache Derby, Android
application development, joomla, wordpress. I have an experience in
using Apache software foundation opens source projects and using jira,
maven, etc.

Please include a link to the bug you fixed for the GNOME module your
proposal is related to.
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=548636

This is a bug I fixed in Banshee. These are bugs now I’m working on to fix.

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=576722

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=614039

If available, please include links to any other code you wrote for
GNOME or other open source projects.
I implemented a plugin for Selenium IDE for GSoc 2011 project and
successfully completed it. This is the reference for it.
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/project/google/gsoc2011/udesh/26001

I helped for the Banshee release 2.3.5 .reference for it.
http://banshee.fm/download/archives/2.3.5/

What other relevant projects have you worked on previously and what
knowledge you gained from working on them?
A java project I did in my first year
https://github.com/udesh1107/Library_System . In the second year I did
data structures and algorithm projects which I had to use searching
and other algorithms. In addition I have done small java project to
chat in a local network.
https://github.com/udesh1107/Chat_Application_Using_Java

 I have involved in developing Android mobile applications to benefit
the open source community with the knowledge I’ve got.
http://code.google.com/p/android-intel-sms/   is an android
application to manage sms with integrating advanced features that is
not available in prevailing release of Android mobile platform. This
is an Android application which will protect your mobile phone being
theft. https://github.com/udesh1107/Android-Phone-Protector.

Now I’m working as a trainee software engineer at Navantis IT (Pvt)
Ltd which is using cutting edge technologies of Microsoft.
www.navantis.com  so I’m using C# in developing various kinds of
applications.

This is a windows application I developed to get the live cricket
score and show in the working window title using C#.
https://github.com/udesh1107/Cricket_LiveScore_On_windows_title     in
this project I’m reading the RSS www.cricinfo.com live matches and
list the matches and user can choose the cricket match. After choosing
the match I’m reading the live score from the particular URL from
minute to minute and updating the title of the working window with
live score.

- David