[GRASS-user] Statement Huidae Cho

[Huidae Cho]

Dear All,

I feel very honored to be nominated for the PSC and really appreciate this
opportunity.

I started using GRASS in June 2000 for my Master's thesis, optimization of
a hydrologic model. I was using FreeBSD as my main operating system at that
time and had to go through a lot of hurdles to be able to use GRASS on my
machine. I remember I sent a lot of emails to the GRASS mailing list and
Markus Neteler asking for help and started creating my own patches to make
GRASS compilable on FreeBSD. Since I joined the GRASS development team in
2000, I have ported the Fortran 77 source code of TOPMODEL to GRASS (
r.topmodel <https://grass.osgeo.org/grass79/manuals/r.topmodel.html> and
r.topidx <https://grass.osgeo.org/grass79/manuals/r.topidx.html>), updated
the earlier 3D GUI (NVIZ), and improved the usability of various modules.
Recently, I developed a new hydrologic module (r.accumulate
<https://grass.osgeo.org/grass78/manuals/addons/r.accumulate.html>). As a
non-Western user and developer of GRASS, I have also been working on I18N
including FreeType support, wide-character (CJK) formatting libraries (
libaprintf <https://github.com/HuidaeCho/libaprintf> and cjkformat
<https://github.com/HuidaeCho/cjkformat> incorporated into GRASS), and
Korean translations. I was fortunate enough to get familiar with a decent
amount of the extensive codebase of GRASS for the past two decades.

I use GRASS on Linux mainly for hydrologic modeling and analysis for my
research, but I am trying to introduce GRASS to my geospatial science and
computing students. My school labs still have GRASS 7.4.4, but I wanted to
use the latest stable release or daily builds. Since most, if not all, of
these students do not have admin rights on lab computers, they are stuck
with the older version with some bugs that are already fixed. For this
reason, I am very interested in making GRASS as portable as possible
without requiring admin rights. Part of that effort was to package it as
extractable ZIP files (grass-mingw-scripts
<https://github.com/HuidaeCho/grass-mingw-scripts> and grass-build-scripts
<https://github.com/HuidaeCho/grass-build-scripts>) so they can  simply
extract a ZIP file onto their choice of a folder with no installation
process at all.

As a PCS member if elected, I would like to focus on the portability and
usability of GRASS for non-admin Windows users to attract more young
geospatial students to GRASS in educational settings. I would also like to
see the growth of GRASS into the non-Western world, so I will continue to
work on the code for multi-character and translation supports. In terms of
new functionalities, I would like to see a web frontend of GRASS and a
server-client data model to save CPU time loading heavy data into the
memory repeatedly. As a relatively old member of the GRASS community, I
will support new developers and users by providing historical perspectives
and sharing what I have learned so far. For example, I hope to support and
mentor GSoC developers. I am very excited about the future of GRASS.

Best Regards,
Huidae
-- 
Huidae Cho, Ph.D., GISP, /hidɛ t͡ɕo/, 조희대, 曺喜大
GRASS GIS Developer
https://idea.isnew.info
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