In next few post i am going to suggest some ideas which can be picked up as projects. And first in the series is Apache Mahout. Apache Software Foundation is probably most important opensource foundation[1]. And i love to make quote ‘nobody gets fired using apache libraries’. Apache Mahout is an open source project to implement all the major machine learning algorithms in java. It covers algorithms on recommendations, classification, clustering and many more areas i am not aware of . These algorithms are highly optimized and often run on multiple nodes than single server using map/reduce paradigm(more on this later). Many companies including adobe, amazon foursquare, yahoo are using Mahout in their production systems. If you are interested in machine learning and algorithms, its a very good project to start working. Idea is to pick up an algorithm and implement it along with proper tests and may be a demo program. Here is a list of Algorithms planned to be implemented. If you are still reading, i assume you are interested to explore a little more on this. Great !! You can start getting idea what machine learning algorithms are. Read Collective Intelligence first. In the meantime decide which algorithm you wants to implement. Join the mahout mailing list.  And yes, you can contact me. Cheers,