1998 - 1999 CS Annual Report                                                                  Faculty
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Klara Kedem

Mary Upson Visiting Professor 
kedem@cs.cornell.edu 
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/kedem

PhD Tel Aviv, 1989

My research area is Computational Geometry with 
applications to problems in computer vision and bio- information. The attempt to deal with practical problems (like shape comparison)  by investigating their geometric nature, yields a better theoretical understanding of the problems and provides sound and efficient algorithms. Among the theoretical problems I work on are problems in geometric optimization, such as covering a set of points by a given number of shapes and facility location. I have investigated the 

 Klara Kedem
minimum Hausdorff distance as a tool for measuring shape resemblance  between images. Many practical problems in the area of shape comparison seek a fully automated solution. The robustness of the minimum Hausdorff distance lends itself to such  problems. In the last two years I have looked into shape comparison problems in three dimensions. Such  problems arise in many life-science disciplines. In computational molecular biology I have come up with a new metric, the URMS, to measure substructure resemblance between proteins. This measure has been implemented and further applied to the analysis of molecular dynamics. It proves superior to previously used measures. With the department of life sciences at Ben Gurion University I have been looking at dendrite shape comparison and classification. Here we applied a three dimensional Hausdorff distance for the problem and are in the midst of devising new measures. 

Professional Activities
  • Editorial board: Pattern Recognition Society Journal. 
  • Reviewer: Israeli-US Bi-National Science Foundation; The Academia - Ministry of Science, Israel; Pattern Recognition 
  • Journal; International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications. 
Lectures 
  • Fast detection of geometric substructure in proteins, Tel-Aviv University, Computational Geometry seminar, 1998.  
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  • —.  Dagstuhl Workshop on Computational Geometry, Dagstuhl, Germany, 1999. 
  • The advantages of the URMS for determining protein similarity, Ben-Gurion University, Computer Science colloquium, 1999. 
Publications 
  • Getting around a lower bound for the minimum Hausdorff distance, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 10(1998), pp. 197-202 (with L.P. Chew). 
  • Enclosing k points in the smallest enclosing axis parallel rectangle, Information Processing Letters, 65(1998), pp. 95-99 (with M. Segal).  
  • On some geometric selection and optimization problems via sorted matrices, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 11(1998), pp. 17-28, (with A. Glozman and G. Shpitalnik).  
  • Geometric applications of posets, Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 11(1998), pp. 143-156, (with M. Segal). 
  • Constrained Square Center Problems, Scandinavian Workshop on Algorithm Theory (SWAT'98), Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1432, Springer-Verlag, pp. 95-106, Sweden, 1998, (with M. Katz and M. Segal). 
  • Geometric Pattern Matching in d-Dimensional Space, Discrete and Computational
    Geometry    , 21(1999), pp. 257-274, (with L.P. Chew, D. Dor and A. Efrat). 
  • Computing a double-ray center for a planar point set,  International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications, 9(2)1999, pp. 103-123, (with A. Glozman and G. Shpitalnik). 
  • Fast detection of geometric substructure in proteins,  International Conference on Computational Molecular Biology, pp. 104-113, France, 1999,  (with L.P. Chew, D.P. Huttenlocher and J. Kleinberg).