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I work as an assistant professor in the algorithms group of prof. Mark de Berg of the
computer science department in the Eindhoven University of Technology.
An algorithm is a procedure for doing a computation. Algorithms
research strives to design algorithms that produce correct results
fast, even when a large amount of data needs to be processed. I do
research in the areas of computational geometry and I/O-efficient
algorithms. Computational geometry or geometric algorithms
is the area of algorithms research that deals with
computations on geometric objects. Examples of such objects are points,
lines and polygons in the plane---which may represent a city plan---or balls,
blocks and more complex shapes in three dimensions---which may represent
the interior of a power plant. In these cases, the geometric
objects represent physical objects in the real world. But
this is not always the case. For example, a database storing the
age and salary of a company's employees can also be thought of as a
database that stores points in a two-dimensional space: each point
represents an employee, with one coordinate indicating the age and
the other coordinate indicating the salary of the employee.
Therefore, geometric computations are found in many applications of
computers: databases, computer-aided design, geographical information
systems, flight simulators and other virtual reality applications,
robotics, computer vision and route planning are just a few examples.
I/O-efficient algorithms, also known as external-memory algorithms,
are designed to process amounts of data
that are so big that they do not fit in main memory. In that case,
I/O, that is, reading data from disk and writing data to disk, often becomes
the bottleneck in a computation, rather than the time spent actually
computing. I am particularly occupied with I/O-efficient algorithms
for geometric data in spatial databases or geographic information systems. An overview of my research can be found here.
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About Me:
Research
Publications
Teaching:
Contact Information
Christian Volk (PhD expected 2016)
Ed Schouten (MSc expected 2012)
Nicky Gerritsen (MSc expected 2012)
Marvin Raaijmakers (MSc expected 2012)
Algorithms Group
Foundation for Refugee Students in the Netherlands (UAF)
Haverkorts Worldwide
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