Alper Üngör, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Bio

Alper Üngör’s research is on the junction of the two main branches of computer science, theoretical computer science and scientific computing. Specifically, his research interests are in computational geometry, with special emphasis in mesh generation. His main goal is to understand the mathematical (mostly geometrical) structure of engineering problems and develop provably good algorithms to solve them.

There are many application domains – computer graphics, computer-aided design, computer vision, robotics, scientific computing, computational biology and geographic information systems and others- in which geometric algorithms play a fundamental role. During his Ph.D. studies at the University of Illinois, he has mainly focused on the geometric problems arising in finite element mesh generation. During his postdoctoral studies at Duke University, he was involved in the BioGeometry project, an interdisciplinary effort to address fundamental computational problems in the representation of molecular structures and the simulation of biochemical processes important to life.

Research Areas

Algorithms, Computational Geometry

Education

Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2002
M.B.A., Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, 1998
M.S., Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, 1996

Publications

Hale Erten, Alper Üngör: Quality Triangulations with Locally Optimal Steiner Points. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing 31(3): 2103-2130 (2009)

Alper Üngör: Off-centers: A new type of Steiner points for computing size-optimal quality-guaranteed Delaunay triangulations. Comput. Geom. 42(2): 109-118 (2009)

Daniel A. Spielman, Shang-Hua Teng, Alper Üngör: Parallel Delaunay Refinement: Algorithms and Analyses. Int. J. Comput. Geometry Appl. 17(1): 1-30 (2007)

Sariel Har-Peled, Alper Üngör: A time-optimal delaunay refinement algorithm in two dimensions. Symposium on Computational Geometry 2005: 228-236

Jeff Erickson, Damrong Guoy, John M. Sullivan, Alper Üngör: Building spacetime meshes over arbitrary spatial domains. Eng. Comput. (Lond.) 20(4): 342-353 (2005)

David Eppstein, John M. Sullivan, Alper Üngör: Tiling space and slabs with acute tetrahedra. Comput. Geom. 27(3): 237-255 (2004)

Awards & Distinctions