Here are some ideas for contestants:

1. MLOperation. Currently, PythonGateway provides low-level PythonOperation aimed at expert users who write Python code themselves. The idea of MLOperation is to build a high-level Interoperability adapter targeted at a broader userbase. Essentially your adapter provides generalized Fit/Predict/Optimize methods and users need to provide the data, target model type, and hyper parameter values. This closes the gap between the hands-off approach of the IntegratedML and low-level approach of the PythonGateway. The work is described in this issue.
2. New ML language. Interoperability with numerical computational languages or even CASes proper are great and offer the freedom of choice. Furthermore, these math-oriented languages allow faster problem search/space traversal than more generalized languages such as Python. Several classes of supporting ML problems can be solved with them. Callout interface makes implementation process easy (reference implementations: PythonGateway, RGateway, JuliaGateway). Suggested languages: Octave, Scilab. 
3. New showcases in IoT, Real-Time predictions, RPA. Convergent Analytics group provides a lot of starting templates in these fields - as InterSystems IRIS capabilities are an especially good fit for them. I'm always interested in more examples, especially real-life examples of machine learning.
4. Data Deduplication solutions. Do you have a dataset with a lot of dirty data and know how to clean it? Great. Make a showcase out of it.
5. Reinforcement learning showcases. Examples of Partially observable Markov decision process or other reinforcement learning technologies.

Also, note that PythonGateway-Template is built upon the Advanced Analytics image, so you can use both IntegratedML and PythonGateway from the same docker image.

Very interesting.

One of our customers is running BPMN processes in Ensemble.

Would like to read about your approach.

%XML.TextReader probably.

Check $SYSTEM.Sharding.DeassignShard().

Give CSPSystem user access to the database with a REST broker.

Just use a service with EnsLib.File.InboundAdapter.

How many files are there in total?

How many (on average) do you need to process per day?

@Yuri Marx you can use "@Name" to mention someone.

@Sarvesh Raut is your server available over HTTPS (and call HTTPS endpoints)?

Please post the code of GatewayState method.

Calling @Luca Ravazzolo 
 

Please file a WRC ticket?

Not really.

Object ByRef means pointer itself may be changed (so we need to pass a pointer to a pointer), which is exactly what happens in this method.

A more correct qualifier would be Output as old object is always discarded.

But initializing stfp before the call would serve no purpose in this case.