<div dir="ltr"><div><div>Hello,<br><br></div><div>I am Borja Menéndez, a PhD student in Computer Science starting his third year of studies from Madrid, Spain. In particular, my field of study is optimization problems. In my thesis I'm working on combinatorial problems related to retrieving orders from warehouses. You can see my first JCR paper in [1] for more info about this.<br><br></div><div>As you can imagine, I'm really interested in the project titled "Fast k-centers Algorithm & Implementation". I find this optimization problem truly challenging and funny to work with. In the last few weeks I'm being attracted to Machine Learning and I think this project is a good start for me since it is a good mixture between optimization problems and machine learning. During my master I worked with an optimization problem relatively similar to this one: MaxMin Diversity Problem. I know it is not the same problem but, probably, the ideas I used for that problem could work here.<br><br></div><div>Currently, and from the last two years, I'm working with Java, but I also have programmed my whole master thesis in C++ (more than 12.000 lines of code) in an open source project called JdeRobot, a robotics framework. You can see my contribution to the project in [2] (my github username is bmenendez [3]).<br></div><div><br>Are you open to try other algorithms (different from the Dual-Tree proposed in the ideas page) such as Variable Neighborhood Search / GRASP / Tabu Search to address the problem? Are you planning to write a paper if the obtained solutions are good enough to do it? Do you have a set of problem instances to start working on this problem and trying some naïve ideas?<br><br></div><div>I also wanted to congratulate for your work in mlpack since it is an extremely easy to install library and your documentation is remarkably complete.<br></div><div><br></div>Best regards,<br><br></div>Borja.<br><br>[1] - <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305054816300168">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305054816300168</a><br>[2] - <a href="https://github.com/RoboticsURJC/JdeRobot/graphs/contributors">https://github.com/RoboticsURJC/JdeRobot/graphs/contributors</a><br>[3] - <a href="https://github.com/bmenendez">https://github.com/bmenendez</a><br></div>