EINDHOVEN – TU/e Professor Bettina Speckmann (algorithms and visualizations professor) has received a Vici grant of one and a half million Euros. She is one of 32 prominent scientists who received this grant from the NWO. Speckmann intends to use the grant to develop geometric algorithms to visualize patterns in complex data, for example to visualize riverbed displacement and the evolution of ideas in old books.
Advanced technology such as GPS, CCTV and RFID-tags mean it is easier to track the movement of all sorts of objects, from people and animals to riverbeds and coastlines. All this data is useless unless you can structure it. The correct algorithms can bring order to this chaos and bring relevant patterns to the surface. Speckmann wants to use the Vici grant to take things a step further, she explains “many moving objects are hard to imagine as a point, consider a river bed for example. Understanding how the river evolves over time is important for the villages and cities in the vicinity of the river in order to calculate the risk of flooding. If you can compare the evolution of one river with another, you can learn from the data and make better predictions”..Source: TU/e Cursor
