Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
European Initiatives
FP7 & H2020 Projects
GUDHI
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Title: Algorithmic Foundations of Geometry Understanding in Higher Dimensions
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The central goal of this proposal is to settle the algorithmic foundations of geometry understanding in dimensions higher than 3. We coin the term geometry understanding to encompass a collection of tasks including the computer representation and the approximation of geometric structures, and the inference of geometric or topological properties of sampled shapes. The need to understand geometric structures is ubiquitous in science and has become an essential part of scientific computing and data analysis. Geometry understanding is by no means limited to three dimensions. Many applications in physics, biology, and engineering require a keen understanding of the geometry of a variety of higher dimensional spaces to capture concise information from the underlying often highly nonlinear structure of data. Our approach is complementary to manifold learning techniques and aims at developing an effective theory for geometric and topological data analysis. To reach these objectives, the guiding principle will be to foster a symbiotic relationship between theory and practice, and to address fundamental research issues along three parallel advancing fronts. We will simultaneously develop mathematical approaches providing theoretical guarantees, effective algorithms that are amenable to theoretical analysis and rigorous experimental validation, and perennial software development. We will undertake the development of a high-quality open source software platform to implement the most important geometric data structures and algorithms at the heart of geometry understanding in higher dimensions. The platform will be a unique vehicle towards researchers from other fields and will serve as a basis for groundbreaking advances in scientific computing and data analysis.