Ryan Vandersmith

Ryan Vandersmith is an R&D software engineer with over 10 years of experience and a deep self-taught background in meteorology. He builds weather forecasting and analysis tools used by photographers, storm chasers, and researchers, including Mesoview (skychaser.mesoview.app), a cloud inversion forecast tool, a mountain wave visualization tool, and a stepwise CAPE/CIN contribution to SounderPy. Professionally, he worked on Caffeine.ai, an AI website builder, and led Motoko programming-language tooling, including a VS Code extension with more than 85,000 installs. He also has experience with cross-chain EVM integrations, developer-experience products, UX research, Rust research software at the University of Colorado Boulder, consulting, and public-sector software.

Built an interactive visualization tool in Rust to accompany research on typed incremental computation with names. The project made the programming language output explorable in a browser.

Incremental computations reuse work that is unaffected when their inputs change. To do this in a general-purpose language, programmers need a way to identify which dynamic allocations (data and subcomputations) correspond across runs. Fungi, a typed functional language by Matthew A. Hammer, Jana Dunfield, Kyle Headley, Monal Narasimhamurthy, and Dimitrios J. Economou, makes these names formal and statically verifiable. Its type-and-effect system lets programmers encode local invariants about names and use them to prove global uniqueness, meaning names are used correctly. The paper proves that well-typed Fungi programs respect global uniqueness, and a Rust prototype of the language was applied to a library of incremental collections.

The visualizer lets readers step through Fungi programs and inspect their incremental behavior directly in the browser, instead of reading only the formal semantics.

[Paper on arXiv](https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.07826)

An online visualization tool for the paper 'Fungi: Typed incremental computation with names.'

Incremental Computation Visualizer

Worked with Dr. Matthew Hammer on a programming language for Adapton, an incremental computing system.

Developed an online visualization tool for the paper "Fungi: Typed incremental computation with names," using Rust and programming language theory.

Worked on Adapton, an incremental computing system, and built a Rust visualization tool for research on typed incremental computation.

Research Assistant

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