Jeff Erickson's Research
For many years I described myself as a computational geometer—my research focused on the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures to manipulate geometric objects (points, lines, curves, spheres, polyhedra, and so on). Over the last several years, the main focus of my work has shifted to computational topology, focusing mostly on algorithmic questions involving graphs embedded on surfaces. Specific problem areas I have worked on include basic questions in combinatorial geometry and topology; analysis of realistic geometric inputs; geometric range searching; algorithms for continuously changing data; and applications of geometry and topology to combinatorial optimization, computer graphics, robotics, spatial and temporal databases, and mesh generation.Most of my research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, under several different grants — an NSF Mathematical Sciences Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, a CAREER award (CCF-0093348), two ITR grants (DMR-0121695 and CCF-0219594), an MSPA grant (DMS-0528086), a regular Algorithmic Foundations grant (CCF-0915519), and a Cyberinfrastructure EAGER grant (OCI-0948393). I was also supported by a Sloan Research Fellowship from 1999 to 2002.
My stuff
- My curriculum vitæ [pdf]
- My publications (also by subject area)
- My research profiles at ACM Digital Library, DBLP, Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic Search, and Scopus
- My CAREER proposal: "Realistically Efficient Geometric Algorithms"
My local colleagues
- I work with come fantastic graduate students, especially
Amir Nayyeri and
Kyle Fox.
- Until recently I was the nominal chair of the CS department's
algorithms and theoretical
computer science research group.
- Other Illinois faculty (past and present) whose academic interests overlap mine include Bob Haber, Chandra Chekuri, Doug West, Edgar Ramos (now in Colombia), George Francis, Ilya Kapovich, Jean Ponce (now at ENS), John Hart, John Sullivan (now at TU Berlin), Michael Garland (now at NVIDIA), Rob Ghrist (now at Penn), Sariel Har-Peled, Seth Hutchinson, Steve LaValle, and Zoltán Füredi.
My global colleagues
- Eight of my former students have graduated with PhDs:
- Alper Üngör
(PhD 2002), who I
stole fromco-advised with Shang-Hua Teng, is an associate professor of computer science at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Alper won an NSF CAREER award in 2009.- My first academic grandchild Hale Erten (PhD 2009, Florida) works in the computational lithography group at Intel Oregon.
- Shripad Thite (PhD 2005) is a software engineer at Google.
- David Bunde (PhD 2006) is an assistant professor of computer science at Knox College.
- Dan Cranston (PhD 2007) is an assistant professor of mathematics at Virginia Commonwealth University. I was Dan's MS advisor; Doug West was his PhD advisor.
- Erin Chambers (PhD 2008) is an assistant professor of computer science at St. Louis University. Erin won an NSF CAREER award in 2011.
- Feida Zhu (PhD 2009) is an assistant professor of information systems at Singapore Management University. I was Feida's advisor for his first few years at Illinois, before he found his real voice working with Jiawei Han.
- Kevin Milans (PhD 2010) is an a visiting assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. I was Kevin's MS advisor; Doug West was his PhD advisor.
- Amit Patel (PhD 2010, Duke) is a postdoc at Rutgers university. I was Amit's MS advisor; Herbert Edelsbrunner was his PhD advisor at Duke.
- Alper Üngör
(PhD 2002), who I
- My coauthors include
Alper Üngör*,
Amir Nayyeri*,
Belén Palop,
Bob Haber,
Bojan Mohar,
Carmen Cortés,
Christian Knauer,
Damrong Guoy,
Danny Krizanc,
David Bremner,
David Eppstein,
David Mount,
Éric Colin de Verdière,
Erik Demaine*,
Erin Chambers*,
Estie Arkin,
Ferran Hurtado,
Francis Lazarus,
Fred Rothganger*,
George Hart,
Godfried Toussaint,
Greg Aloupis*,
Hai Yu*,
Helmut Alt,
Henk Meijer,
Hervé Brönnimann,
Ileana Streinu,
Jean Ponce,
Jeff Vitter,
Joe Mitchell,
Joe O'Rourke,
John Hershberger,
John Iacono,
John Sullivan,
Jonathan Lenchner*,
Jorge Stolfi,
Julien Basch*,
Kim Whittlesey,
Kyle Fox*,
Lars Arge,
Leo Guibas,
Li Zhang*,
Mark Overmars,
Marshall Bern,
Matt de Vos,
Michael Garland,
Mike Soss*,
Olivier Devillers,
Oswin Aichholzer,
Pankaj Agarwal,
Pat Morin,
Paolo Franciosa,
Perouz Taslakian*,
Pratik Worah*,
Raimund Seidel,
Reza Abedi*,
Rob Ghrist,
Sándor Fekete,
Sariel Har-Peled,
Scott Kim,
Sergio Cabello,
Shripad Thite*,
Shuo-Heng Chung*,
Stefan Langerman,
Sue Whitesides,
Suneeta Ramaswami,
Sylvain Lazard,
Timothy Chan,
Vida Dujmović*,
Vin de Silva,
Xavier Goaoc,
Yong Fan*, and
Yuan Zhou*.
(*Stars indicate co-authors who were students during our first collaboration.)
- I can still lower my Erdös number, but not without writing another paper.
Me again
Here's a picture of me working in Barbados. The small folded-up piece of paper (a chain of right isosceles triangles joined along their short sides, or an unfolded paper football) and the larger multicolored toy (a chain of quarter circles joined end to end) can be moved in precisely the same ways. So in some sense, these two objects are "the same". I'm admiring the isomorphism, which is a fancy mathematical way of saying "staring off into space". My hair and my glasses are both smaller now, but alas, not my eyebrows.
I came in late to Jeff Erickson's 8:30 pm talk on "Lower Bounds in Computational Geometry." Jeff's a CS grad student at Berkeley, and when I emailed Yarvin to ask if he knew this guy Jeff who did theoretical computational geometry, he responded, "Theoretical computational geometry makes me ill."
Jeff Erickson
(jeffe@cs.uiuc.edu)
21 Mar 2012