Frank Nielsen: Biography sketch.

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I am a researcher of the Fundamental Research Laboratory of Sony Computer Science Laboratories (Sony CSL FRL for short). I received a Bachelor's (arithmetic topic: Continued and multi-continued fractions with Professor P. Kornerup) and Master's (geometry topic: Output-sensitive algorithms in computational geometry with Professor Boissonnat) in computer science from École Normale Superieure (ENS) of Lyon (France) in 1992 and 1994 respectively, where I studied among others parallel algorithms (yes, in the early nineties parallel computing was trendy and we were lucky to get our hands on Connection machines CM2, transputers, etc. Today, we are more P2P or grid computing-oriented in the industry). I then focused on computational geometry at INRIA (research unit of Sophia-Antipolis) under the supervision of Professor Jean-Daniel Boissonnat. I obtained my Ph. D. on "Adaptive Computational Geometry" ("Algorithmes géométriques adaptatifs" in french) in 1996 from the University of Nice (France). As a civil servant of the University of Nice, I gave lectures at the engineering schools ESSI and ISIA (École des Mines de Paris). In 1997, I served army as a scientific member ("scientifique du contingent" in french) in the computer science laboratory of École Polytechnique (LIX). In 1998, I joined Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Tokyo (Japan). My current research interests include computational geometry, vision, graphics, optimization and learning. Last but not least, I am interested in technology transfers that bring a complementary view of solving requirements in an industrial setting. I am an ACM member.

Five representative publications (or jump to the selected list):

Frank Nielsen and Richard Nock,
On Region Merging: the Statistical Soundness of Fast Sorting, with Applications,
IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),
Volume 2, pp. 19-26, 2003.
Matthew J. Katz, Frank Nielsen and Michael Segal,
Maintenance of a Piercing Set of Intervals with Applications,
Algorithmica, Springer-Verlag,
Volume 36, pp. 59-73, 2003.
Frank Nielsen,
High Resolution Full Spherical Videos,
IEEE International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC),
pp. 260-267, 2002.
Frank Nielsen,
On Point Covering of c-Oriented Polygons
Theoretical Computer Science (Elsevier Science),
Volume 265, Issue 1-2, pp. 17-29, 2001.
Alon Efrat, Matthew J. Katz, Frank Nielsen and Micha Sharir,
Dynamic Data Structures For Fat Objects and Their Applications,
Computational Geometry: Theory and Its Applications (CGTA), Elsevier Science,
Volume 15, Number 4, pp. 215-227, 2000.

Awards and Grants:

Sony Research Forum, prize nominee (2001).
Nicograph (Computer Graphics association in Japan), grand prize (2000).
Sony Research Forum, paper prize (1999).
Grants from the Research and Education Ministry in France (1991-1996).

Biographical listings:

International Scientist of the Year, 2003 (International Biographical Center of Cambridge)
Marquis's Who's Who, 2002

I am heartily grateful to people who helped me forged my current research guidelines. In particular, I would like to acknowledge professors M. Cosnard (ENS Lyon), Y. Robert (ENS Lyon), J.-D. Boissonnat (INRIA Sophia-Antipolis), P. Kornerup (Odense University), J.-M. Steyaert (École Polytechnique), H. Imai (Tokyo University) and M. Tokoro (Sony) from whom I benefited many great discussions and were valuable source of inspiration.

I had several foreign research stays:

1993: Univeristy of Odense (Denmark), Computer Science Dept. (3 months).
1995: Max Planck Institute (Germany), Algorithms Dept. (1 month).
1996: University of Tokyo (Japan), Information Science Dept. (3 months).
1996: University of Hong Kong (ROC), Computer Science Dept. (2 weeks).
1999: University of Beer Sheva (Israel), EE and Mathematics Dept.(1 month).

My Erdös number is 3:

David Avis, Paul Erdös, János Pach: Distinct Distances Determined By Subsets of a Point Set in Space. Comput. Geom. 1: 1-11 (1991)
János Pach, Micha Sharir: On Vertical Visibility in Arrangements of Segments and the Queue Size in the Bentley-Ottmann Line Sweeping Algorithm. SIAM J. Comput. 20(3): 460-470 (1991)
Alon Efrat, Matthew J. Katz, Frank Nielsen, Micha Sharir: Dynamic data structures for fat objects and their applications. Comput. Geom. 15(4): 215-227 (2000)

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Last updated 2003.