Carola Wenk's Research Page

Carola Wenk's web pages.

NSF CAREER Award

This page describes the scope and results funded by the following grants:

8/1/2009 - 7/31/2010 REU supplement to NSF CAREER grant, $8,000. Role: PI.

3/1/2008 - 2/28/2009 REU supplement to NSF CAREER grant, $12,000. Role: PI.

8/1/2007 - 7/31/2008 REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) supplement to NSF CAREER grant, $12,000. Role: PI.

3/1/2007 - 2/29/2012 "CAREER: Application and Theory of Geometric Shape Handling", NSF CCF-0643597, $400,468. Role: PI.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

Abstract

The objective of this research is to help increase speed, quality, and productivity of shape handling in practice. Geometric shapes are at the core of a wide range of cutting-edge technological sectors including computer vision, computer aided design (CAD), robotics, bioinformatics, computational biology, medical imaging, geographical information systems (GIS), and drug design, in which a multitude of tasks for manipulating and handling geometric shapes have to be performed efficiently and reliably. This research is based on two research tracks: (i) shape handling applications and (ii) shape handling theory. The investigator will continue to foster interdisciplinary communication, contribute more theoretical soundness to applied problems, and pursue a stronger theoretical foundation which can be the basis for a wider range of applications. Specifically, this research involves several applied projects including, but not limited to, computational proteomics, computational neuroscience, and spatiotemporal traffic databases. Semi-automatic algorithms will be combined with theoretical expertise in order to pave the road for high-throughput processing in areas with very noisy data. Theoretical projects include matching and distance measure problems for curves and surfaces, multi-curve matching, initiation of a general study of geodesic distance measures in which distances are measured using shortest paths on a surface, and shape simplification. Lower bounds will be investigated in order to gain better insight into the structure of the problems, and application-friendly algorithms such as output-sensitive algorithms and approximation algorithms will be devised in order to better cope with outliers and noisy inputs.

Research projects and results

The following research projects have received funding from this award: (A full list of all my research projects can be found here.)

Shape Matching

Map-Matching and Routing
Algorithms for matching GPS curves to a given roadmap and reactive routing algorithms that adapt to dynamically changing travel-times are essential technical components for Traffic Estimation and Prediction Systems.

Shape Matching of Curves
Compare geometric shapes described by polygonal curves using adequate distance measures such as the "man-dog" Fréchet distance.

Geodesic Distances for Shapes
Compare shapes on surfaces using shortest distances between points along the surface. This has high applicability in military and GIS applications in which objects traveling on various terrains are involved.

2D Frechet Distance
The Frechet distance is a well-suited distance measure for the comparison of surfaces.

Computational Biology

Analysis of 2D Electrophoresis Gels
Correctly modeling the shapes of protein spots in 2D electrophoresis gels as well as comparing two and more of such gels is highly important in Computational Proteomics.

Last modified by Carola Wenk, cwenk -at- tulane -dot- edu ,

8/1/2009 - 7/31/2010	REU supplement to NSF CAREER grant, $8,000. Role: PI.
3/1/2008 - 2/28/2009	REU supplement to NSF CAREER grant, $12,000. Role: PI.
8/1/2007 - 7/31/2008	REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) supplement to NSF CAREER grant, $12,000. Role: PI.
3/1/2007 - 2/29/2012	"CAREER: Application and Theory of Geometric Shape Handling", NSF CCF-0643597, $400,468. Role: PI.

	Map-Matching and Routing Algorithms for matching GPS curves to a given roadmap and reactive routing algorithms that adapt to dynamically changing travel-times are essential technical components for Traffic Estimation and Prediction Systems.
	Shape Matching of Curves Compare geometric shapes described by polygonal curves using adequate distance measures such as the "man-dog" Fréchet distance.
	Geodesic Distances for Shapes Compare shapes on surfaces using shortest distances between points along the surface. This has high applicability in military and GIS applications in which objects traveling on various terrains are involved.
	2D Frechet Distance The Frechet distance is a well-suited distance measure for the comparison of surfaces.