TLDR: Searching for person holding professor position to officially act as a committee member on a US PhD defense

Hi all,

I’m in a non CS field. I’m doing PhD in hydrology and I’m good at Geospatial Analysis, data analysis, visualization, modeling and such. I really like programming and have been making open source programs, contributing to open source programs and such. And have been learning rust for last 2 years.

For my PhD dissertation I’m doing a project where I’ll be using Rust to make a program with compiled plugin system that can do generalized river related tasks including data analysis and visualization. I have professors in GIS and hydrology to guide those aspects, but I don’t have anyone on software side to ask questions, or to look at my work. I tried emailing some people I have seen with open source projects on GIS+rust, but no response.

I’m ideally looking for someone that holds a professor position for my committee who is good with either rust, GIS related algorithms development, and programming languages. However, it woud also be helpful to just have someone woth knowledge about such things. In either scenario, credit and authorship will be given.

I appreciate any response even telling where i could find someone matching the above description. :)

Edit: I can also provide my previous projects in GitHub, websites and such before you decide in messages.

  • @solrize
    -2•1 month ago

    Why rust? It’s trendy but it’s really best for systems work despite the zealots.

    • @thevoidzeroOP
      9•1 month ago

      I’m trying to do computationally intensive things, and I didn’t want to do them in C/C++ because of practical reasons. I am making a python library as well, so people using the program can either use the CLI/rust library or the python library. The plugins and the core program is in Rust.

      • EpheraEnglish
        5•1 month ago

        You might already know about it, but PyO3 could come in very handy for creating that Python library. You can use it to generate a small Python library which calls your Rust library, so you don’t need to implement it a second time.

        • @thevoidzeroOP
          2•27 days ago

          Yes thank you. I am using it. I’m good with finding things on the Internet but I’m struggling with parts that are deeper and not well documented. There are big projects that use pyo3, but not plugins. And there are big projects with plugins but not pyo3.

      • @solrize
        -5•1 month ago

        How about almost anything else? Go, Ocaml, Ada. Haskell, etc ? You might also consider CUDA if your problem naturally parallelizes.

    • @[email protected]
      6•1 month ago

      Yeah I feel like this is a job for python and maybe rust bindings for anything really numerically intense.

      Anywho, is there no professor in your CS department that could suggest an external? They don’t need to be a Rust user, programming is programming.

      • @thevoidzeroOP
        8•1 month ago

        There is a python library as well. But the core algorithm and the plugins are in rust. The GIS component also is computationally intensive or memory intensive, that makes Rust have advantages over python. And the Whitehouse is also talking about more memory safe languages so it seems like a good choice to do it in rust over c/c++ for computational parts and the plugin architecture.

        Edit: As for professors. I need external professor for my committee, and this is a good option as I’m not familiar with any CS professors in my university that do grad research.