Google Summer of Code 2013 Ideas

Visualization

• Ruby D3. Rubyvis, our current visualization tool, is a Ruby port of Protovis. Protovis was recently supplanted by D3. We would like to produce a Ruby port of D3.
• Rubyvis/D3 JavaScript helpers for Rails. Rubyvis is pure Ruby code, but Protovis and D3 are Javascript. It would be nice to be able to write Rubyvis code which can either render SVGs directly or produce Javascript code that can render SVGs in a web browser. The goal is to provide interactive scientific tools for Ruby on Rails.

Numeric / NMatrix

• ATLAS Functionality. NMatrix has many but not all ATLAS (cBLAS) and LAPACK functions exposed. We would like to see a consistent interface which makes sense in Ruby. We also want to be able to design and implement several NMatrix methods which depend upon ATLAS, cBLAS, and cLAPACK functions.
• Rational Functionality. NMatrix includes some rational number capability, but support is lacking in areas where ATLAS functions are required, since ATLAS does not have a rational type. Rational-specific equivalents of ATLAS functions are needed. Along the way it may be possible to also implement some integer-specific ATLAS function equivalents.
• List matrix element-wise operations. Element-wise operations work for Yale and dense matrices, but not yet for list matrices.
• Slicing support. @flipback began implementing slicing support, but it is incomplete. Slicing needs to be integrated into a major portion of NMatrix methods.
• Basic matrix math functionality. Specifically, exponentials and square roots, matrix decomposition/factorization, calculation of norms, tensor products, principal component analysis (PCA).
• Statistical functions for matrices and vectors. Statsample needs to support NMatrix, accepting/returning matrices and vectors as well as single values.