CISE News & Events
Assistant Professor Alper Üngör receives the prestigious NSF CAREER Award
April 21st, 2009
Geometric problems are at the heart of many computational problems in science and engineering. Over the last few decades, computational geometers has made significant contributions to many areas in science and engineering by designing provably good algorithms, data structures and software. There remains, however, many fundamental geometric problems still open even in two dimensions. Geometric problems and the optimality of their solutions in three and four dimensions (e.g., spacetime) where the most interesting applications reside, are much less explored.
Alper Üngör, as assistant professor in the CISE Department at UF, received the CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his research titled "Computational Geometry, Mesh Generation, and Geometric Modeling". CAREER Award is considered one of NSF's most prestigious awards honoring the scholars who are likely to become academic leaders in the future. NSF has given this award since 1996 to junior faculty who effectively integrate research and education within the context of the mission of their institution. This award provides $400,000 funding for Dr. Üngör's research for the next five years. This is the eleventh CAREER Award in the CISE Department, and the first in the area of Algorithms. This is also the second NSF grant for Üngör's research group.
Dr. Üngör's recent work has been on figuring out "how to connect the dots". He designed algorithms connecting the dots modeling a geometric shape and producing optimal (in output size and quality) triangulations. His time-optimal algorithm has been well received in the theory community as it comes with a proof of being the fastest possible algorithm. Experiments show that several variations of this algorithm run significantly faster than the previously available software. Üngör's algorithm and implementation are already integrated into award-winning triangulation software and is in use by thousands of engineers and researchers resulting in more efficient scientific simulations. Extension of these methods to higher dimensions and to dynamic problems is challenging but the promise for real life applications is great. Üngör believes that only by improving our understanding of the fundamental concepts we can provide efficient and correct solutions to more real life problems. He expects the next few years to be very exciting for the researchers in the geometric algorithms field.
Geometric modeling for simulation of complex physical phenomena raises many challenges including algorithmic efficiency, practicality, scalability, robustness, theoretical guarantees, and compatibility with the emerging numerical methods. Üngör's research group study solutions for geometric discretization problems for spatial domains (encountered in conventional scientific computing) and for space-time domains (motivated by the next-generation numerical methods being developed for solving PDEs directly in the space-time continuum). Their approach combines the strengths of theoretical algorithms (time complexity, output size optimality, and quality guarantees) and practical heuristics (ease of implementation, performance in practice, and scalability).
The algorithms and the software tools developed within Üngör's group are being integrated with applications and contributing to the fundamental research in engineering, scientific computing, computer-aided design, visualization, geographic information systems, and computational molecular biology. As a result, his research has broader impact across a number of scientific, medical and industrial fields. Moreover, Professor Üngör focuses on making academic impact through the inclusion of underrepresented groups, and the development of interdisciplinary courses linking fundamental concepts in theoretical areas such as graph theory, geometry and topology to application problems in biology and engineering.
Alper Üngör joined the University of Florida and the CISE faculty in 2004. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in October 2002 and spent two years as a postdoc at Duke University. At Illinois, he was honored academically with several awards including the David J. Kuck Best Ph.D. Thesis Award, a Computational Science and Engineering Fellowship, the C.L. Dave and Jane W.S. Liu Award, and Excellence in Teaching Award. Professor Üngör, a native of Turkey, also has an M.B.A. from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, in addition to his B.S. degree in Computer Science.
