W. Randolph Franklin, Professor
Electrical, Computer, and Systems Engineering Dept.,
6026 JEC,
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
110 Eighth St,
Troy NY, 12180
USA

Communication

Vcards         How To Email Me         GPG key
phone: +1.518.276.6077 (let it ring many times)
Travel Directions to RPI

 


Snowshoeing, Feb 2009

Amazonian rainforest, July 2009

Professional

BSc (Toronto), AM, PhD, Applied Math (Harvard).
Program Director, Numeric, Symbolic, and Geometric Computation Program, CISE, National Science Foundation, 2000-2002.
Visiting Professor, UC Berkeley, 1985-1986.
Visiting positions at Genoa, Laval, CSIRO Canberra, National University of Singapore, 1992-1993.
supervised 13 PhD and 65 masters graduates.
Brief Bio       Long resume
          

Teaching, students

ECSE-2500, Engineering Probability, Spring 2010
ECSE-4750 Computer Graphics Fall 2009
ECSE-6800 Advanced Computer Graphics Spring 2009 
Older courses
Advice To Grad Student Applicants
Advice To DQE Examinees
Teaching philosophy (Jan 2007)
Famous RPI graphics-related grads

Research

Geometry has been my overriding interest since high school in the 1960s. Geometry is the "branch of mathematics that deals with the measurement, properties, and relationships of points, lines, angles, surfaces, and solids" 1. The Geo in geometry is from the Greek Γη meaning, ''earth, ground, land''. 2. My major recently concluded project was Geo*, a DARPA-funded project for representing and operating on terrain, that is, elevation.

Geo* accomplishments:

  1. efficient hi-res visibility computation on terrain,
  2. multiple observer siting to maximize joint viewshed,
  3. ODETLAP, an extension of the Laplacian PDE to an overdetermined system of equations, which is used in many of the following results,
  4. extremely compact lossy terrain (elevation) compression,
  5. terrain compression that reconstructs slopes accurately,
  6. lossily compressed terrain supports motion-planning (path planning),
  7. path planning with sophisticated cost metric on large terrain, and
  8. a better surface fitting procedure for bathymetry data that is very unevenly spaced.

My current project 3 attempts to predict how erosion occurs in levee failure by overtopping, and, after a failure, to reverse-simulate what happened.

I've applied the same underlying principles in Computational Geometry producing algorithms useful for large datasets, mostly in 3D, and usually implemented.

Here are various details: strategy · computational cartography · computational geometry · other topics · proposal writing notes · misc notes · former masters (65) and doctoral (13) students · new topics.

FWCG2009

Christopher S. Stuetzle, Zhongxian Chen, Katrina Perez, Jared Gross, Barbara Cutler, W. Randolph Franklin, and Thomas Zimmie. Segmented height field and smoothed particle hydrodynamics in erosion simulation. extended abstract.

ACM SIGSPATIAL GIS2009

Tsz-Yam Lau, You Li, Zhongyi Xie, and W. Randolph Franklin. Sea floor bathymetry trackline surface fitting without visible artifacts using ODETLAP. paper, poster: pptx|pdf, fast forward talk. video. Awarded the best fast forward presentation.

FWCG2008

Operating on large geometric datasets,

Fall Workshop in Computational Geometry (FWCG) 2008, 1 Nov 2008, extended abstract, talk, (11/2/2008). Longer papers and talks on the same topic:

  1. Analysis of mass properties of the union of millions of polygedra
  2. Mass properties of the union of millions of identical cubes]
  3. related talk
  4. earlier but more detailed talk

ACMGIS2008

3 presentations by my students at 16th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2008), Irvine CA, 5-7 Nov 2008.
  1. Parallel ODETLAP for terrain compression and reconstruction. paper, talk.
  2. Path planning on a compressed terrain. poster.
  3. Evaluating hydrology preservation of simplified terrain representations. PhD student poster (won a best poster award), fast forward presentation.

Recent additions

  • HTML version of my resume including links to most of my papers and talks. (6/22/2009)
  • Reorganization and updating of my Research pages. (6/17/2009)
  • My letter to the Albany (NY) Times Union recommending Pres. Jackson to replace Sen Clinton. (1/4/2009)
  • New Workshop Organizers Cheat Sheet. (12/13/2008)
  • Updated Proposal Writers Cheat Sheet. (10/30/2008)
  • Reorganized web site, (10/19/2008)
  • The Fall Workshop in Computational Geometry 2008 (FWCG2008) is at RPI on Fri Oct 31 and Sat Nov 1, 2008. The local arrangements chair is Barb Cutler. The accepted abstracts are online. (10/30/2008)
  • Updated resume-franklin.pdf with links to most papers and some talks. (5/5/2008)
  • Update home page; new page: GeoStar. (4/26/2008)
  • My letter to the Albany NY Times Union on state support of private higher education, (12/28/2007)
  • reorganized home page, (12/13/2007)
  • NSF And DARPA - talk at RPI, (12/10/2007)
  • Misc points for my advisees (started 3/13/2007)

 

     

Locations of visitors to this page

Things that don't fit anywhere else

 

1 (Merriam-Webster dictionary) ⇑

2 The American Heritage® Book of English Usage ⇑

3 Cutler, Zimmie, Franklin. NSF CMMI-0835762: CDI-Type I: Fundamental Terrain Representations and Operations ⇑

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