Klara Kedem

Visiting Professor
kedem@cs.cornell.edu
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/kedem
Ph.D. Tel Aviv University, 1989

My research area is computational geometry with applications to problems in computer vision and bioinformation. 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 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 three 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 Member: Pattern Recognition Society Journal.

Guest editor: Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications.

Program Committee Member: 16th ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, Hong-Kong, June 2000; Organizer and chair of scientific committee, the 16th European Workshop on Computational Geometry, Eilat, Israel, March 2000.

Reviewer: Israeli-U. S. Bi-National Science Foundation; The Academia - Ministry of Science, Israel; Pattern Recognition Journal; International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications.

Lectures

Computational Geometry: from Computer Vision to Computational Biology. The Natural Sciences Forum, Ben-Gurion University, Israel, December 1999.

Publications

“Improved algorithms for placing undesirable facilities.” The 11th Canadian Conference on Computational Geometry, pp. 65-67, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada (with M. Katz and M. Segal).

“Optimal facility location under various distance functions.” Workshop on Algorithms and Data Structures (WADS’99) (1999), Canada.

“Lecture Notes in Computer Science 1663.” Springer-Verlag, 318-329 (with S. Bespametnik and M. Segal).

“Unit-vector RMS (URMS) as a tool to analyze molecular dynamics trajectories.” Proteins: Structure, Function and Genetics, 37 (1999), 554-564 (with L.P. Chew and R. Elber).

“Fast detection of geometric substructure in proteins.” Journal of Computational Biology 6:(3-4) (1999), 313-325 (with L.P. Chew, D.P. Huttenlocher and J. Kleinberg).

“Discrete rectilinear 2-center problems.” Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications, 15 (2000), 203-214 (with M. Katz and M. Segal).

“Comparative analysis of dendritic architecture of identified neurons using the Hausdorff distance metric.” Journal of Comparative Neurology, 422(3) (2000), 415-428 (with A. Mizrahi, E. Ben-Er, G.J. Glusman, M. Katz, and F. Libersat).