About Me
I am an assistant professor in the Applied Geometric Algorithms group at TU Eindhoven. From October 2012 to October 2014 I was a postdoctoral researcher at UC Santa Barbara under the supervision of prof. Subhash Suri. Before that, I was a PhD student at TU Eindhoven under the supervision of prof. Bettina Speckmann.
Research Interests
My main research interests lie within the area of computational geometry. I am specialized in using theoretical techniques from computational geometry to solve real-world problems, mostly in the area of information visualization.
My favorite research topics:
- Computational geometry
- Graph drawing
- Automated cartography
- Social network analysis
- Information visualization
Current Projects
GlamMap
I am involved in the GlamMap project (including the closely related GlottoVis project). The goal of this project is to develop an interactive geo-spatial visualization tool to visualize GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums) metadata, e.g. bibliographic records, on a geographic map.
VENI-project
I recently acquired a VENI grant on Stable Geometric Algorithms. This is a personal grant for three years awarded by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. In this project I will study the stability of geometric algorithms from a theoretical perspective. The stability of geometric algorithms plays an important role in the visualization of dynamic or time-varying data. Dynamic visualizations that are too "jumpy" do not convey their information well. Often there is a tradeoff between the (static) quality of a visualization and its stability, as demonstrated by the treemap video below. In the left treemap the rectangles have smaller aspect ratios, but the right treemap is more stable.
In this project I will develop new tools to measure the stability of geometric algorithms. Furthermore I will formally analyze and bound the stability of both old and new algorithms.