[OLPC-devel] SoC Update: OEPC

[Eric Astor]

Hello everyone,

 

I’m Eric Astor, yet another SoC (Summer of Code) student. I don’t have any
code posted in my git repository yet - the little code I’ve used for testing
purposes makes use of an external open source library, but I need to check
into some possible redistribution restrictions first. Obviously, this isn’t
likely to be the final code I use – or anything like it, for that matter.
There’s some question on the matter of algorithms…

 

This week, my main work has been assembling a spec for the set of utilities
that I intend to work on… these obviously include the actual ranking
utility, using an algorithm yet to be determined. However, I’d also like to
at least start work on an export utility, to get the raw MediaWiki data
(wikitext and such) into a format readable on the laptop. I spent most of
the week researching formats and existing export techniques, without any
real conclusion. However, I have a basic spec draft done – not including the
export format. I’ve posted the draft at HYPERLINK
"http://home.comcast.net/~epastor/SoC-OEPC_Spec.odt"http://home.comcast.net/
~epastor/SoC-OEPC_Spec.odt. 

 

I’m planning to spend the next week looking into algorithms again. In
particular, I’m hoping to start the slow process of resolving the patent
issues around network centrality algorithms (which are currently keeping me
from posting the code I have so far), while also looking for alternatives
with less patent issues. Of course, the resolution could be that I can’t get
permission to use either of the big two established techniques, in which
case it’s looking like I’ll have quite a bit of research to do. One of the
patents (*cough* PageRank *cough*) actually appears to cover even the most
basic method of determining network centrality, which is to compute the
dominant eigenvector of the adjacency matrix, so I’ll need to check into
that. I’ll be consulting Ivan quite a bit on the potential politics of this
process… the last thing I want to do is make anyone else’s job harder by
screwing up my own.

 

- Eric


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