Contributing to Platform for Situated Intelligence

We welcome contributions from the community in a variety of forms: from simply using it and filing issues and bugs, to writing and releasing your own new components, to creating pull requests for bug fixes or new features, etc. This document describes some of the things you need to know if you are going to contribute to the Platform for Situated Intelligence ecosystem.

Code of conduct

This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct. For more information on this code of conduct, see the Code of Conduct FAQ or contact opencode@microsoft.com with any additional questions or comments.

Filing Issues

We encourage you to use GitHub issues to flag problems and bugs, or issue requests for new features.

We have already defined the following issue labels:

bug: these issues describe code defects.
documentation: these issues are requests for additional or improved documentation.
feature request: these issues are requests for additional or improved documentation.
help wanted: these issues are specifically well suited for outside contributors.
good first issue: these issues are small and appropriate for people who wish to familiarize themselves with GitHub pull requests and/or \psi's contributor guidelines, build process, and running tests. We're here to help you get started in open source.

Contributing New Components

One of the stated goals for the Platform for Situated Intelligence project is to create an open eco-system of pluggable components that can lower the barrier to entry for developing multimodal integrative-AI systems. If you have a new component you have written for \psi that you think might be useful to others, we encourage you to release it to the community if possible. Here are a few recommendations and guidelines that we believe would help enable a future thriving eco-system:

NuGet. Release if possible as a NuGet package: NuGet packages are easy to consume and work on both Windows and Linux.
- Naming. Use the following naming conventions:
  - Name the package [YourInstitution].Psi.[Foo]
  - Append .Windows or .Linux if the package only runs on one of those operating systems
  - Append .x64 or .x86 if the package only runs on those platforms (e.g. if it is not AnyCPU)
- Description. In the package description, use a phrasing like: Provides Platform for Situated Intelligence APIs and components for ...
- Tags. In the package tags, add Psi.
Target. Where possible, target .NET Standard: this will allow your component library to work cross-platform.
Let us know. If possible we'd love to hear from you when you develop a new package. You can do so by opening an issue, tag it with the announcement tag, and including a pointer to your component.

Contributing to the Existing Code-base via Pull Requests

Apart from contributing by releasing your own Platform for Situated Intelligence components, you could also contribute by fixing bugs, improving documentation, adding new features to the existing codebase.

Legal

You will need to complete a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) before your pull request can be accepted. This agreement testifies that you are granting us permission to use the source code you are submitting, and that this work is being submitted under appropriate license that we can use it.

You can complete the CLA by going through the steps at https://cla.microsoft.com. Once we have received the signed CLA, we'll review the request. You will only need to do this once.

Code Organization

Below is a description of the directory structure for the Platform for Situated Intelligence source tree. Every time you modify the structure by adding a new project, please update the table below.

Folder	Subfolder	Description
Build		Contains \psi build tools.
Sources		Contains \psi source code.
Sources	Audio	Contains class libraries for audio components.
Sources	Calibration	Contains class libraries for calibrating cameras.
Sources	Common	Contains class libraries for common test support.
Sources	Data	Contains class libraries for creating and manipulating datasets.
Sources	Devices	Contains class libraries that support enumerating devices.
Sources	Imaging	Contains class libraries for \psi imaging, e.g. images, video capture, etc.
Sources	Integrations	Contains integrations - libraries that provide shims around 3rd party libraries.
Sources	Kinect	Contains class libraries for Azure Kinect and Kinect V2 sensor components.
Sources	Language	Contains class libraries for natural language processing components.
Sources	Media	Contains class libraries for media components.
Sources	RealSense	Contains class libraries for RealSense sensor component.
Sources	Runtime	Contains class libraries for \psi runtime.
Sources	Speech	Contains class libraries for speech components.
Sources	Toolkits	Contains toolkits - e.g. Finite State Machine toolkit, etc.
Sources	Tools	Contains tools - e.g. PsiStudio, etc.
Sources	Visualization	Contains class libraries for visualization.

Coding Style

For the most part, the Platform for Situated Intelligence codebase follows these coding conventions along with these design guidelines.

In case you would like to add a new project to the Psi.sln we require that the project is setup in a similar ways to the other projects to ensure consistency.

Build and Test

To fully validate your changes, do a complete rebuild and test for both Debug and Release Configurations.

Pull Requests

We accept bug fix pull requests as well as new feature pull requests. For bug fixes, please open a corresponding issue for the bug and link to it, if one does not already exist. We also recommend you open an issue if you plan to develop new features, which will help facilitate community discussions about the design, implementation, etc.

Pull requests should:

Include a description of what your change intends to do
Be a child commit of a reasonably recent commit in the master branch
Pass all unit tests
Have a clear commit message
Ideally, include adequate tests

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