“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.”

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.

Bettina received her PhD from the University of British Columbia (Canada) in 2001. Afterwards she spent two years as a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Computer Science of ETH Zurich (Switzerland) before joining TU Eindhoven as an assistant professor  in 2003. She became associate professor in 2008 and was promoted to full professor in 2012. Since 2015 she is leading the Applied Geometric Algorithms group.

Bettina was a member of both the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (2010-2015) and of the Global Young Academy (2011-2016). In 2011 she won the first Netherlands Prize for ICT Research. She served as PC co-chair for the 19th International Symposium on Graph Drawing (GD) in 2011, as PC chair for the 42nd International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP) – Track A in 2015, and as PC co-chair for the 34th International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG) in 2018.

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