Akarsha and Ramya are not your regular individuals, a dash of crazy, a drop of weird and a couple of undiscovered unusual ingredients makes them up. They can be found studying in the same college of IIIT Delhi and sharing the same hostel room, adding a whole new meaning to birds of a feather flock together. Their acquaintance started with their mutual interest in coding and fascination for artificial intelligence. Slowly but steadily they started bonding and realized that despite one being from North India and the other from South, one being a die hard Korean fan and the other a Game of Thrones fan, they are eerily similar. Their sun signs (which both are extremely fond of) also matched! While looking for the perfect team name, ‘Gemini’ which literally means ‘The Twins’ made perfect sense. In the short span of two years, they have managed to gather all sorts of memories with each other, reading for tests together, doing assignments together, bickering and laughing the next moment, watching youtube videos, heated discussions on random topics or just not seeing eye to eye with one other. They’ve been through it all and vehemently attest that their bond keeps going strong because of all their experiences together.
She is too excited about every new thing that comes her way.
She is a die hard Korean fan (finds them cute for some reason) and her long time dream is to visit South Korea. Though I am pretty sure she would love to visit any place as long as she gets to travel.
She is a confused soul with a 100 things on her plate.
She dreams to be a successful Entrepreneur.
Wants her life to be fun filled and exciting always.
Very lazy at times. Mastered the art of doing more in less
Loves fan-fiction, can’t survive without Harry Potter fanfics at least once a week
Gets her fat from nowhere(she hardly eats anything.. And if she does, she exercises to burn those calories)
Wants to know about anything and everything interesting under the sun and gets very excited every time she manages to do this. Her youtube feed is filled with random explanations about random things
He is a doctoral student working in the field of biometrics and machine learning at IIITD. He has completed his Mtech in from IIIT Allahabad. He recently went to West Virginia University for a 9-month Internship program. He also works in other fields like Pattern recognition, Face recognition, face spoofing, Image analysis to name a few.
He is a junior at IIITD, majoring in Computer science, Polygot Programmer, passionate about Opensource, with a side of research. Shiven is a 2016 GSoC intern with Fossasia and worked in Loklak.
He has just completed his MTech from our college only and did his BTech from NIT Shrinagar.
He is an AI enthusiast in Research and applications of Machine learning/deep learning in speech recognition and computer vision. He is well versed with various libraries like Kaldi, Tensorflow, Theano and Keras.
He is an assistant researcher at BIDS and a senior lecturer in applied mathematics at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He has been involved in the development of scientific open source software for more than a decade and enjoys teaching Python at workshops and conferences. Stéfan is the founder of scikit-image and a contributor to numpy, scipy, and dipy.
He is a research scientist at the University of Melbourne, with interests in neuroscience and biological image analysis. He is also a freelance consultant in scientific Python programming, with a particular interest in renewable energy and the environment.Also, he is the author of the book Elegant SciPy, published by O’Reilly media.
A big thank you to our new mentors for taking us on board at such a short notice!
She is an Open Source enthusiast and works as a Linux kernel engineer at Oracle. She is also a blogger and outreachy alumni. She motivates everyone to get started with linux kernel and also takes up workshops for the same.
Our Project(s)
About Susi-AI Server
Susi AI is an open source artificial Intelligence for chatbots, personal assistants, help desks. Recognising the need to personalise chatbots Susi also provides a platform to personalise skills to a user’s requirements.
About Scikit-image
Scikit-image is an open source image processing library for the Python which includes collection of algorithms for segmentation,color space manipulation, analysis, filtering etc. It’s largely written in Python, with some core algorithms written in Cython to achieve performance. Scikit-image is designed to interoperate with the Python numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy.
What we’ve done so far and some unexpected events :O
Time indeed flies. While working with SusiAI Server, we’ve already sifted through the large code base, understood it, made small PRs here and there, learnt git, understood what a frontend architecture like react does and realized the effort a community puts in maintaining a project.
However, between all this work, we realised that the goals of our mentors and that of RGSOC aren’t aligned. After some deliberation, our supervisor and RGSOC organisors chose to change our project. Thus, we are now assigned Scikit-image, which was infact our first choice of project :p
A very Happy Independence Day to all my fellow Indians here :) We are Team Bundledore, and our project is AFDC League Management System
The last one and a half-month has been really hectic with all the learning, connecting and mentoring. We have truly never enjoyed an internship so much before.
We were sort of a ‘Wild-Card’ entry, our selection was confirmed in the middle of May. We were so excited(still are) as this was quite unexpected.
Why ‘Team Bundledore’ you ask ?
We are die-hard Potterheads :) (Bundle+ Dumbledore).
Our Logo (created by Amrita Nair and Anagha R)
About us:
Alfie, Anagha, Amrita from left to right. (Photo credits: Alfie's phone)
We are both part of an extremely active FOSS Club at our college. That’s where we met. Didi(that’s the term we use to refer to our seniors) was a sophomore and I(Amrita) was a fresher. We started our journey there, everyday gathering at 4:30 PM, to help each other learn new technologies, one of them being Rails.
Anagha describes herself as a melophile who is passionate about open source. A biology student at her High School and she got interested in FOSS during the start of her first semester of Computer Science Engineering. She joined the FOSS club at our university which helped her improve her technical and personal skills. She loves helping people (especially her juniors), and uses her free time to help them with their academic and non-academic issues.
I am a voracious reader(I don’t even leave the cereal boxes unread) and an open source enthusiast. My primary interest is Web Dev and Rails is my favorite right from the time I started working with it. I have always been passionate about contributing to open source because the joy of collaborating with people from all over the globe and creating something for everyone to enjoy, is indescribable. Like others at our club, I help my juniors with Rails, getting them in touch with people in the industry who can guide them.
In my free time, I read some more and try clicking candid photos of my friends.
Mukesh is our super cool coach who also doubles as our counsellor. He is always there to guide us with technical details and also when we feel low. Kudos to him !
PS: One of his most popular sayings: “If you aren’t getting any errors, you are doing it wrong ;)”
Alfie is our no-nonsense coach. Always to the point and on-time.Not the kind to lead us by our hand and tell us the solution! The Git master, he has pulled us out of many Version Control screw-ups. Thanks a lot Alfie :)
Our awesome awesome mentor.What astonishes us is that he almost always knows the solution to the error. Docker was our nemesis the last month(it’s all okay now) and Pete always came to our rescue. Cheers Pete !
Our Supervisor, always punctual on Supervisor calls and one of the first to answer any of the RGSoC interns queries on Slack. Always online and ready to help. We are glad to have you on our team :)
Go Team Bundledore <3
What’s in store after RGSoC ?
We have a three pronged plan on what we can do. Ideas are always welcome.
Encourage our juniors and any one we can to contribute to open source. We currently lead a group of very excited girls who plan on making it big in the open source world.
Contribute and give back to the community. We would not be here if not for the support of the members of the Kerala Ruby Users Group. We’d like to help and foster open source culture among the women here because even now, there are very few of them.
Lastly, host a Rails Girls Workshop, here in Kollam ! It’s inline with our future plans and we have started preping up :)
TRIGGER WARNING - This article, and pages it links to, contains information about depression, burnout and/or suicide which may be triggering to survivors.
When was the last time you saw a blog post or meme embracing and celebrating people that regularly work 60+ hours every week with no weekends or vacation? We, founders and entrepreneurs, are supposed to hustle and play all-in with our time and effort regarding what we are working on. And it’s not only founders, but also their employees, who are often being “incentivized” to adopt this kind of approach.
I’m also a startup founder. However, as a founder of a mental health technology startup, I consider myself much more mindful of my own mental health than most of the other founders, entrepreneurs or investors. Our goal with Mentegram is to bridge the gap between the clinicians and people suffering from issues like depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses. Our software platform helps clinicians and their patients reduce the paperwork what gives the clinicians an opportunity to provide more efficient care to their patients.
I really like the RGSoC tradition of having the Day Off — a day on which students are meant not to work on their project and instead, do anything they’d like to do. This day is your chance to take care of yourself and to be mindful of your mental health. This year, it’s on August 18th. For some students, the Day Off just means “not coding”; for others, it’s the possibility to try doing something new and exciting or to spend the day outdoors and with friends. If you need some ideas on what to do on your very own day off, here are some of the ideas. The only rule is: no work, no commits, no learning code for that single day. It may be difficult, but very rewarding if you can follow through ;)
While running a company and working for a startup is usually a lot of fun, it’s like riding a rollercoaster. You will get really sick when you don’t take any breaks and if you keep riding anyway, you will never want to ride a rollercoaster again. Or at least not anytime soon.
You never ride a rollercoaster for way too long, because you feel when you start feeling sick. However, many people don’t realize when their mind starts feeling “sick”. What I mean by “sick” are the early symptoms of depression, burning out or maybe anxiety. While I’m no clinician and have no clinical background, having worked with therapists as well as going to therapy myself helped me better understand how the mind works.
By all means, this post doesn’t intend to serve as a clinical advice and I don’t take responsibility for any actions that you decide to take after reading it. Instead, I’m sharing my story; my goal is to raise awareness and help you realize that you should be aware of your own mental health. By sharing stories like this, I believe that we are fighting the stigma. Many celebrities have done so as well: Whether it was Katy Perry live-streaming her therapy session, the British Royal family campaign to get Britons talking about mental health, or Michelle Obama standing up for mental health. I’m not exactly sure what started it all, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say it had something to do with the suicide of Robin Williams.
Being aware of your own mental health is important, and being aware of mine helped me avoid burnout or depression at least in the following situations.
1. Unsuccessful fundraising
The first time it happened, we were trying to raise a second investment round for Mentegram. It didn’t go well, because we were too early for what we wanted to achieve. Even though many investors gave us very positive feedback on what we do and on our elevator pitch, they still ended up backing out from the deal quite early. We learned the lesson the hard way: The positive feedback was giving us very high hopes—and when you fly high, you fall really deep. That’s when I also realized that no-one would most likely give you negative feedback when your goal is to improve mental health of millions of people around the world and you were on the right track. Just too early and without a validated sales strategy.
The positive feedback made me work long hours and very hard. I remember updating our pitch deck during Christmas to make sure that the investor would get it on time. I’m not sure why their deadline was Dec 28th. We traveled from Slovakia to Norway to visit my brother and his family. On Christmas Day, I was sitting in the living room in a comfy chair right next to the Christmas tree. My wife, my parents as well as my brother with his family were having fun watching Christmas movies, enjoying the company of each other and eating all the good things that you can imagine. I remember putting my earphones and music on because I needed to focus while I still wanted to be in the same room with them.
Fast forward to June: We still didn’t have the investment and we started running out of money; I was out of energy and literally unable to focus on anything. Our sales didn’t work well because I spent too much time on fundraising, but the fundraising wasn’t going well either. But most importantly, I was in some kind of half-operational mode when I wasn’t really able to do much work. That’s how my summer went and I’m really thankful to my wife who supported me and helped me recover. It was end of summer when we managed to raise the round that we needed to, and all was good again. Not only me, but the whole team felt like re-born.
What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but looking back, it was close. If I didn’t take the summer “half-off”, I can’t imagine how I would have been able to continue even with the new investment. I really learned the lesson the hard way, because I could have done things much better and with lower effort during those eight or nine months. It almost feels like the completely wasted few months of my life. The only good thing about them is probably the fact they helped me avoid a similar situation this year.
Lesson learned:
It doesn’t have to be a big “project” such as fundraising for my own company. It can be a client project that takes too much time because the client keeps requesting changes, it can be a toxic colleague that makes you feel like you don’t want to get out of bed and get to work or even a bug that you aren’t able to resolve. It happens to all of us; the important thing is not to wait and hope that it will end. It’s much better to take your life into your own hands and do something about it. Even though it’s definitely not easy, and may be way outside of your comfort zone. Take a break, speak up, be confident and fair, definitely not arrogant. Many people don’t do it and in many situations, it works wonders. Time is our most precious resource, let’s not waste it.
2. Fighting with time
As every startup, things are going at times well and at times not so well. However, we changed our approach to business development and things started getting better. That would make you think that there was no way for me to start feeling depressed when things go well. But because we changed our sales strategy, seeing the outcome took quite some time. Even though it was exactly as we planned it, it was too long. It got to the point where I felt there was almost nothing I could do to make things happen. The progress was still happening as we planned it; I felt helpless.
I used our software to take depression assessments and I noticed a negative trend. My wife also noticed that I was losing motivation to do anything, even outside of work. I didn’t even want to go out much or spend time with friends — I just sat on the sofa watching TV on weekends.
Around that time, I met a friend who was seeing a therapist. We talked about it and he said how much she helped him. I asked him to give me her number, I called the therapist and scheduled an appointment. It was a few months ago. I told her my story, we started speaking about my emotions, feeling and everything. It took one or two months and I started feeling much better. I felt that I didn’t need to measure my depression, because I was able to handle the triggers much better.
Lesson learned:
One of the actions that definitely takes most of us outside of our comfort zones is sharing our problems — and feelings — with other people. We are worried and concerned about how the other people would perceive us. However, you would be surprised that close friends and family usually offer help. Of course, I don’t want to false promise anything and it’s likely that you will meet people that will not understand and act arrogant. There is no reason to take it personally though. Speaking with close friends that you trust almost never hurts. And if you are really worried or feel that it may not be enough, reaching out to a therapist is really the best possible thing that you can do. Think of it as your mind having a high fever: You would see your doctor in such case.
What do I want to tell with these stories?
Be mindful of your mental health. Understand when you are sad for a reason and when you are not. Understand when you feel stressed for a reason and when you are not. Be aware of the usual symptoms when they keep showing up, such as losing motivation, losing interest in meeting friends, doing less physical exercise, spending more time binge watching Netflix or TV. If you do spot them, take a break. Get a good night’s sleep. Find someone to talk to about it, ideally a person in a very similar situation to you. For me, it’s other startup founders. And don’t be afraid to ask for help and even reach out to a therapist.
RGSoC has a trust committee to whom you can go if you experience any personal issue you’d like to discuss with someone. While it’s not a replacement for therapy, you should know that the team is there to support you and to make you succeed throughout the summer without having you make compromises on your personal well-being.
Milan Steskal is the founder & CEO at Mentegram. They improve productivity of mental health care. He is a startup mentor and Idea To Funding author in his free time.
Shelby and Lillian with Public Lab's Director of Community Development, Liz Barry (Photo via Shelby Firebaugh)
Shelby is a rising senior at New York University Tandon School of Engineering working towards a B.S. in Integrated Digital Media. Lillian–originally from Surprise, Arizona–is pursuing a B.S. in Integrated Media Arts with minors in Public Policy and Nonprofit Management at New York University Shanghai. Shelby and Lillian met in the media lab at NYU Shanghai when Shelby was studying away with NYU at the Shanghai campus. They bonded initially when they were partnered together in “Talking Fabrics,” a creative seminar that covered the application of soft circuits through the physical construction of products. They stitched together a vest that responded to physical touch using sensors in the Arduino, and have been bonded ever since.
Public Lab promotes a hands-on, do-it-yourself ethos–one that supports the concept of exploration, in which members of specific communities across the globe can participate in the collection of environmental data, through DIY methods explained via the Public Lab website. The monumental idea promoted by Public Lab is that technical development and real-life applications can be derived through data experiments conducted by everyday people.
If government chooses to turn away from solving environmental issues, then it becomes even more important to face these issues in a grassroots fashion. There is power in numbers, and we believe that an organization like Public Lab will be an essential tool in educating and empowering the public, as well as supporting those groups who need help.
Both Lillian and Shelby have an interest in open-source projects, and believe that promoting community participation is not only an efficient way to gather data, but also encourages individuals to become involved regardless of formal experience. We have both spent an extended amount of time in Shanghai, and have witnessed first-hand the damage that industrialization can cause to our environment.
Every week Katie commutes from the North Fork of Long Island into New York City to both teach at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and develop projects at OpenTrons, where she serves as the company’s lead UX/UI designer. Her classroom banter is as hilarious as it is understandable, aiding in our perspective of how dynamic people in technology can be. Katie loves solving problems, and exploring how data representations, games, and emerging web technologies can spark interest in students, children and sceptics. Her interests include bikes, food, the Gowanus Canal, and making beautiful/fun things with math and code.
Marcela is a designer and maker. She has worked on interactive art installations, wearables, web design and physical computing projects. She brings interaction design to the physical world by designing 3D models, mockups and renders. She holds a Master’s diploma in Interactive Telecommunications from the New York University and a Bachelor degree in Architecture. Currently she works as part of the team of YesYesNo, a multidisciplinary company that specializes in interactive art installations and commercial interactive projects. In addition, she is working as an design professor through the Interactive Media Arts program at New York University Shanghai.
Jeffrey is a co-founder and the Research Director for Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Jeffrey Warren designs mapping and civic science tools and professionally flies balloons and kites. Notable software he has created include the vector-mapping framework Cartagen and orthorectification tool MapKnitter, as well as open spectral database and toolkit Spectral Workbench.
Nada Ashraf is a past participant in Rails Girls Summer of Code, and has been an integral part of the support system available to Shelby and Lillian throughout this process. Based in Egypt, she is interested in computer science and inclusive programs in the realm of technological information!
What’s up next?
For the past couple of weeks, Shelby and Lillian have been becoming accustomed to Github through opensource contributions involving Public Lab’s tagging interface, specifically within the realm of powertags. In essence, powertags are an advanced feature which can add extra functions and layout options to Wiki pages or Research Notes on PublicLab.org.
Moving forward, Shelby and Lillian would like to work on developing the UX/UI design of the powertag system, making article tagging more streamlined and understandable for a first-time user. As novices to coding and Public Lab’s interface, team BansheeBandits believes there might be a more welcoming vocabulary regarding the functionality of powertags. In the next couple of weeks we intend on conducting user testing to identify points where the syntax involving powertags might be confusing for the everyday user.
Hola! We are Protichi Basak and Nikita Gupta, fresh Computer Science graduates from IIIT-Delhi, India. And if you were to believe our batchmates, we were amongst the nerdiest girls there (something which gives us more pride than embarrassment for some reason). :P Although we have known each other for four years, our friendship feels like decades old already. It brings a smile to our faces every time we remember our first day, where every student was asked to introduce themselves to the entire batch, but Nikita used that opportunity to find her roommate Protichi instead, for she found the name so unique! Being roommates from the very first day of college we have been partners in all craziness ever since. Yet we are poles apart. While Protichi is a trilingual, hardcore fish-lover hailing from the lands of Bengal, Nikita is a strict vegetarian from North India mad about Rajasthani folk and food!
Our passion to learn new technologies and use them to solve real world issues has driven us this far and has brought us together to make a great team! And this is how we came up with our team name prodyoGEEKY - inspired from the hindi word प्रौद्योगिकी (pronounced as: praudyogikee) meaning Technology!
Just a ‘normal’ day in our dorm room (with Nikita being pranked) at IIIT-Delhi. We miss those times terribly! (Image courtesy: Mohini Verma)
In the past we have worked on a number of projects together. Most recently we worked on Breast Cancer Detection using Deep Learning in Histopathological Images. For our bachelor’s thesis, we both worked in the same research lab (Image Analysis and Biometrics Lab at IIIT-Delhi) where we worked on face and fingerprint recognition.
This summer we are working with OpenLMIS, which is an initiative to support the development of an open-source software for Logistics Management Information Systems (LMIS). The aim of the software is to manage health commodity supply chains in low- and middle-income countries. The end result is a robust and flexible system that provides shared benefit across users and programs. It is currently supported by Rockefeller Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), USAID, JSI, the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities, PATH to name a few. OpenLMIS envisions shared investment and benefit through an open source community and extensible architecture along with interoperability with other health systems. At present, it is deployed in six countries in Africa.
OpenLMIS logo (Image courtesy: Google)
Why we chose OpenLMIS?
A large part of our country still lives in rural parts where there is dearth of qualified doctors, medicines and advanced facilities to provide medical treatment. Last semester, while working towards automated breast cancer detection as a part of our Machine Learning project, we realised that many deaths occur in such underprivileged areas. This is primarily because of untimely diagnosis and delay in administration of good quality medicines due to unavailability. This affected us deeply and we wanted to improve the present conditions of the health and hygiene. As computer scientists, we believe that technology has the power to provide an automated solution to any real-world problem and affect millions of lives!
So while choosing a project for RGSoC, we wanted to contribute to a project which actually has the ability to impact many lives while at the same time, also helps in improving our development and coding skills. OpenLMIS was exactly what we had been looking for and we had an immediate inclination towards it. :)
So without further ado, meet our uber cool team!
Meet our team! (Collage Courtesy: Team prodyoGEEKY)
The team of OpenLMIS is so awesome! It wouldn’t be wrong to say that they are the major source of encouragement for us. Our mentors, Brandon and Nick, are always eager to help us out even on smallest of issues! It is for this reason, nothing holds us back from learning as much as we can from them.
A little more background about our mentors and coaches -
Brandon- With over 20 years of experience in IT, Brandon leads VillageReach’s software innovation as the Software Development Manager. And Brandon is a cycling enthusiast, just like us :)
Nick- A CSS nerd, as he likes to call himself, Nick is a developer and UX/UI expert at Village Reach. He is excited about tools and capacity building.
Tenly- She works towards building a vibrant OpenLMIS community interacting with the existing and new OpenLMIS partner. She has over eight years in international development in Africa.
Karan- A technology enthusiast, Karan loves to get his hands dirty with any new tool he comes across and has won numerous hackathons. One the most creative and sincere guys we know from our college, Karan has been a constant support to us and has helped us incredibly during our application too!
Chhavi- A Noogler, Chhavi has participated as a mentor in various programs that support women in tech. She has also been facilitated by the Honorable President of India for securing first prize in Code for India.
Jigyasa- She has recently been awarded Red Hat Women in Open Source Award. Jigyasa has carved her name as an Open Source enthusiast helping her friends as a mentor. She is also the director of Women Who Code, Delhi.
What’s in store?
One month of RGSoC has already gone by and the experience so far has been nothing but simply amazing! We have already taken our toddler steps towards contributing to the open source community together. This summer, we wish to learn a lot, face new challenges every day to keep ourselves on our toes, debug our codes, develop solutions to new issues, be able to critically analyse and design a solution.
After the summers ends, we will be joining the industry as research and development engineers. It is, therefore, one of our major motivations to be able to learn how to write clean reusable code, document well and work harmoniously in a team of people possessing different skill sets and expertise. Apart from that we wish to be creative too so that anyone and everyone will find it useful in the first place and be able to use it conveniently and intuitively. We not only hope to be better developers, but good team workers and passionate open source contributors as well! :)
As an ending note, we are very grateful to be a part of RGSoC this year where we got to contribute to OpenLMIS and interact with people who are diverse in culture, ideas, knowledge, expertise and bond over what we all share a common passion for, i.e., technology!
