Dan Schult
Dan Schult is the Charles G Hetherington Professor of Mathematics at Colgate University. He comes to scientific computing from studies of spreading processes. In some circles he is better known as a founding developer of NetworkX. He has attended SciPy a number of times and it is always worthwhile.
Sessions
SciPy package scipy.sparse is moving from its matrix API to an array API. This will allow sizes other than 2D, and clean up treatment of the multiplication operator *. This talk will start by describing the changes and their impacts. We will then discuss the process of revamping an API without messing up existing user code too much. And the trade-offs between slow changes over many releases vs. faster, perhaps breaking changes. And choosing whether to just make a new package instead. The talk should be useful for users of scipy.sparse and also for packages considering a major API change.
NetworkX now allows third-party libraries to contribute optimized algorithms and new functionality to be executed in place of the default Python-based implementation, without requiring changes to its familiar and easy-to-use API. This lets NetworkX continue to be the portable and ubiquitous graph analytics library available to virtually any platform supported by Python, yet automatically take advantage of specialized code and/or hardware present in particular environments when available.
This should be useful to NetworkX users, potential NetworkX backend developers, and developers of other libraries interested in implementing backend dispatching for their codebase.