Section: Research Program

Data Structures and Robust Geometric Computation

Geometrica has a large expertise of algorithms and data structures for geometric problems.We are pursuing efforts to design efficient algorithms from a theoretical point of view, but we also put efforts in the effective implementation of these results.

In the past years, we made significant contributions to algorithms for computing Delaunay triangulations (which are used by meshes in the above paragraph). We are still working on the practical efficiency of existing algorithms to compute or to exploit classical Euclidean triangulations in 2 and 3 dimensions, but the current focus of our research is more aimed towards extending the triangulation efforts in several new directions of research.

One of these directions is the triangulation of non Euclidean spaces such as periodic or projective spaces, with various potential applications ranging from astronomy to granular material simulation.

Another direction is the triangulation of moving points, with potential applications to fluid dynamics where the points represent some particles of some evolving physical material, and to variational methods devised to optimize point placement for meshing a domain with a high quality elements.

Increasing the dimension of space is also a stimulating direction of research, as triangulating points in medium dimension (say 4 to 15) has potential applications and raises new challenges to trade exponential complexity of the problem in the dimension for the possibility to reach effective and practical results in reasonably small dimensions.

On the complexity analysis side, we pursue efforts to obtain complexity analysis in some practical situations involving randomized or stochastic hypotheses. On the algorithm design side, we are looking for new paradigms to exploit parallelism on modern multicore hardware architectures.

Finally, all this work is done while keeping in mind concerns related to effective implementation of our work, practical efficiency and robustness issues which have become a background task of all different works made by Geometrica .