Bettina Speckmann

Bettina Speckmann heads the Applied Geometric Algorithms group at the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science of TU Eindhoven. Geometric algorithms is the field within algorithms research that is concerned with the design and analysis of efficient algorithms and data structures for problems involving geometric objects in 2-, 3-, and higher-dimensional space. The Applied Geometric Algorithms group mainly focuses on geometric algorithms for spatial data and applications of geometric algorithms in the areas of GIScience and Smart Mobility (including automated cartography and moving object analysis), geo-visualization, visual analytics, and e-Humanities. We frequently combine the rigorous methods from algorithmic research areas such as computational geometry - which give performance guarantees with respect to both the quality of solutions and the running time of algorithms - with efficient engineering to achieve results of both theoretical and practical significance.

Humans have an intuitive sense of spatial structures, computers just “see” zeros and ones. I find it endlessly fascinating to teach computers how to gain a human-like understanding of spatial data.”