Archis Gore
2006-01-23 18:09:04 UTC
Dear BLUGies,
Sorry about the multiple mails. To be fair, all my
other mailing lists are getting an equal number of
mails. Just got a weeks worth of free time and plan to
send out thousands of mails.
Since I deal with Neural Networks on a daily
basis, I begged hard enough to get the best (and
possibly only one worth using) ANN package in the
world called NeuroSolutions. It would generally cost
$2500 for a single user license.
During the winter vacation, I went out to search
for a free simulator since NeuroSolutions wont send me
free upgrades anymore and life sucks without it. I
managed to find some good uncopyrighted code (the
author is a small-time student and has kept it free
for redistribution so long as we maintain his credits
without any specific license). I'm in dialog with him
to get it GPL'ed.
In the meantime, I tested it and it's quite good.
What it lacks is a user interface. Being in Java, it
is platform independent, has a very very very
impressive design (something very rare in applications
developed by scientists), and its powerful (in design
terms purely since extensibility is life or death for
an ANN expert). So would anyone be willing to
volunteer to help me finish a GUI for it? Not right
now (due to exams approaching), but during the summer
vacations or over weekends? Mail me off-the-list for
details.
With a nice UI, it could do around 75% of what
NeuroSolutions can do right now. NS is 100% VC++ code
and is totally windows-dependent. NS has VERY heavy
pricing. NS is VERY powerful. What we would make would
be: 100% Java code (I'm banking on the Apache guys to
make their Java clone soon), zero price, almost as
powerful.
Let me know if anyone's interested. And take
your time. I'm not going to work on this till I get
back from LinuxAsia. I know places where I can promote
this. I know for sure ANNs is an area which not many
people can study due to lack of source code. They
generally end up writing their own code which is not
very extensible nor useful beyond their own laboratory
experiments.
GNU had attempted to build something called as
NutShell around 3 years ago (I was going to give a
talk on it at Gnunify that year). But it seems to have
failed completely. The problem is that they focussed
more on graphics rather than data I/O. Since data is
central to an ANN, the fancy graphics doesnt help, but
rather a nice spreadsheet-style entry form would do
wonders.
If interested, you may first download a test
copy of NS at www.nd.com. If SY's want to get
experience in SWING during vacations before TY, this
might be a good way to learn and contribute something
that is desperately needed.
As for porting it to gcc, well, my scientist
side is dominant here and java's object orientation,
serialization and RPC is something I wont give up even
though java is not free.
Yours sincerely,
Archis
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Sorry about the multiple mails. To be fair, all my
other mailing lists are getting an equal number of
mails. Just got a weeks worth of free time and plan to
send out thousands of mails.
Since I deal with Neural Networks on a daily
basis, I begged hard enough to get the best (and
possibly only one worth using) ANN package in the
world called NeuroSolutions. It would generally cost
$2500 for a single user license.
During the winter vacation, I went out to search
for a free simulator since NeuroSolutions wont send me
free upgrades anymore and life sucks without it. I
managed to find some good uncopyrighted code (the
author is a small-time student and has kept it free
for redistribution so long as we maintain his credits
without any specific license). I'm in dialog with him
to get it GPL'ed.
In the meantime, I tested it and it's quite good.
What it lacks is a user interface. Being in Java, it
is platform independent, has a very very very
impressive design (something very rare in applications
developed by scientists), and its powerful (in design
terms purely since extensibility is life or death for
an ANN expert). So would anyone be willing to
volunteer to help me finish a GUI for it? Not right
now (due to exams approaching), but during the summer
vacations or over weekends? Mail me off-the-list for
details.
With a nice UI, it could do around 75% of what
NeuroSolutions can do right now. NS is 100% VC++ code
and is totally windows-dependent. NS has VERY heavy
pricing. NS is VERY powerful. What we would make would
be: 100% Java code (I'm banking on the Apache guys to
make their Java clone soon), zero price, almost as
powerful.
Let me know if anyone's interested. And take
your time. I'm not going to work on this till I get
back from LinuxAsia. I know places where I can promote
this. I know for sure ANNs is an area which not many
people can study due to lack of source code. They
generally end up writing their own code which is not
very extensible nor useful beyond their own laboratory
experiments.
GNU had attempted to build something called as
NutShell around 3 years ago (I was going to give a
talk on it at Gnunify that year). But it seems to have
failed completely. The problem is that they focussed
more on graphics rather than data I/O. Since data is
central to an ANN, the fancy graphics doesnt help, but
rather a nice spreadsheet-style entry form would do
wonders.
If interested, you may first download a test
copy of NS at www.nd.com. If SY's want to get
experience in SWING during vacations before TY, this
might be a good way to learn and contribute something
that is desperately needed.
As for porting it to gcc, well, my scientist
side is dominant here and java's object orientation,
serialization and RPC is something I wont give up even
though java is not free.
Yours sincerely,
Archis
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
Yahoo! Groups Links
<*> To visit your group on the web, go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bcslug/
<*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:
bcslug-***@yahoogroups.com
<*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/