Welcome to our 2014 Google Summer of Code participants!

[Stéfan van der Walt]

Hi everyone,

A warm word of welcome to Rishabh Raj and Vighnesh Birodkar who will
be joining us for this year's Google Summer of Code programme (and,
hopefully, beyond!).  You may recognise their names: Rishabh upgraded
our gallery to generate IPython notebooks [0], and Vighnesh
implemented some neat blob detectors that will see the light in 0.10
[1].

Vighnesh will implement a structure for representing connected regions
/ super-pixels [2], and then illustrate its use at hand of a
region-growing segmentation algorithm.  This type of structure is used
in many algorithms, especially for determining neighborhood
properties, and will enable us to take on a few problems that have
evaded us so far.

Rishabh's project [3] is to build an interactive backend for our
examples gallery, so that one can play around with demo parameters and
see the results at the press of a button.  The system will probably
launch isolated docker instances running on an Amazon VM, while taking
care that available resources are respected.

Also, a big thank you to our mentors for this year: Juan, Guillaume
and Johannes.  Any community member is also welcome to co-advise or
watch the show--simply join us on the skimage-gsoc mailing list [4].

Now until 19 May is the community bonding period [5], so please help
our new contributors feel at home and pull them into as many
activities as possible.  To the students, feel free to jump in: fix
bugs, refactor, help clean up website design, start on your project or
participate in any way that takes your fancy.

Happy hacking!
Stéfan

[0] http://scikit-image.org/docs/dev/auto_examples/
[1] https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/pull/903
[2] http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/public/google/gsoc2014/vighneshbirodkar/5870670537818112
[3] https://github.com/sharky93/scikit-image/wiki/GSoC%2714-Proposal---Building-an-Interactive-Gallery
[4] http://groups.google.com/group/skimage-gsoc
[5] http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/2007/04/so-what-is-this-community-bonding-all.html