Dafna Talmor

  

1638 Tupolo Drive
San Jose, CA 95124
(408) 448-5869
tdafna@earthlink.net

 

LMS Cadsi
3150 Almaden Expressway
San Jose, CA 95118
(408) 445-3941
dafna@lmscadsi.com

Objective:

A development position that applies computational geometry and other aspects of theoretical computer science to solve real-world problems such as mesh generation.

Work Experience:

1997-

Senior Development Engineer, LMS Cadsi.
Member of the Meshing group. Responsible for development of the PolyFEM Mesher, a 3D automatic mesher based on constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization, in Microsoft Visual C++. Specific projects included: triangular and quadrilateral surface meshing, 3D constrained Delaunay tetrahedralization, sliver removal, hexahedral meshing, and mesh improvement based on combinatorial optimization and topological/geometric manipulation.

Summer 1991

Research Intern, IBM Haifa, Israel
Worked on compile-time optimizations targeted to superscalar machines. Investigated the potential of an instruction level profiling tool of the RS/6000 to improve the quality of instruction scheduling algorithms.

Skills:

Strong grounding in algorithm development in areas such as parallel algorithms, computational geometry, and mesh generation. More than 2 years of experience in developing an automatic mesh generation product.
Programming languages and environments: C++, C, Windows NT, nesl, matlab, awk, openGL, Unix

Education:

1990-1997

Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh

Program:

Ph.D. in Computer Science

Completion:

August 1997

Advisor:

Gary L. Miller

M.S. Computer Science, June 1993

Teaching Asst., Spring 1993, CS 15-451 (Algorithms), Prof. Gary Miller.

Teaching Asst., Fall 1993, CS 15-675 (Software Architecture), Profs. David Garlan and Mary Shaw.

1987-1990

Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel
 

Degree:

B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science
Graduated summa cum laude

Research Projects:

Thesis:

Well-Spaced Points and Numerical Methods
The thesis addresses several scientific computing problems: 3D mesh generation, mesh coarsening, and efficient algorithms for Delaunay-based meshes. The notion of well-spaced point sets is introduced. Geometric structure theorems are shown for these point sets, and then used to develop parallel algorithms for higher dimensional Delaunay diagrams and mesh generation. The thesis further demonstrates the usefulness of the well-spaced point sets for the problem of mesh coarsening.

Other:

Parallel Delaunay Triangulation: development and implementation
This project is concerned with developing a practical parallel algorithm for Delaunay triangulation that works well on general distributions. The algorithm was implemented using Nesl, a nested data parallel language. Experiments run using a variety of distributions that are motivated by scientific computing problems show that for these distributions we are within a factor of approximately two in work from the best sequential algorithm.

Awards:

1987-1990

The program for excellence, Tel-Aviv university

Refereed Publications:

Gary L. Miller, Dafna Talmor and Shang-Hua Teng. "Optimal Good-Aspect-Ratio Coarsening for Unstructured Meshes." In Proceedings of the Eighth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, January, 1997, New Orleans, LA

Gary L. Miller, Dafna Talmor, Shang-Hua Teng, Noel Walkington and Han Wang. "Control Volume Meshes Using Sphere Packing: Generation, Refinement and Coarsening." In 5th International Meshing Roundtable, October, 1996, Pittsburgh, PA.

Guy Blelloch, Gary L. Miller, and Dafna Talmor. "Developing a Practical Projection-Based Parallel Delaunay Algorithm." In Proceedings of the Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, May, 1996, Philadelphia, PA.

Gary L. Miller, Dafna Talmor, Shang-Hua Teng, and Noel Walkington. "A Delaunay Based Numerical Method for Three Dimensions: Generation, Formulation, and Partition." In Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, May, 1995, Las Vegas, NV.

Gary L. Miller, Dafna Talmor, Shang-Hua Teng. "Data Generation for Geometric Algorithms on Non-Uniform Distributions." To appear in International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications (IJCGA).

Guy Blelloch, Jonathan Hardwick, Gary Miller and Dafna Talmor. "Design and Implementation of a Practical Parallel Delaunay Algorithm." Algorithmica 24:243-269 (1999).

Gary L. Miller, Dafna Talmor, Shang-Hua Teng, and Noel Walkington . "On the Radius-Edge Condition in the Control Volume Method". SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, Volume 36, Number 6, pp. 1690-1708, 1999.

Gary L. Miller, Dafna Talmor and Shang-Hua Teng. "Optimal Coarsening of Unstructured Meshes." Journal of Algorithms 31, 29-65 (1999)

Sia Meshkat and Dafna Talmor. "Generating a Mixed Mesh of Hexahedra, Pentahedra and Tetrahedra from an Underlying Tetrahedral Mesh", 2nd Symposium on Trends in Unstructured Mesh Generation, University of Colorado, Boulder, August 1999. Also accepted for publication in a special issue of IJNME (International Journal of Numerical Methods in Engineering).

Edelsbruner, Li, Miller, Stathopoulos, Talmor, Teng, Ungor and Walkington. "Smoothing and Cleaning up Slivers", to appear in STOC 2000.

Other:

Citizenship:Israeli. Valid work authorization, awaiting family-based Green Card.
Fluent in Hebrew and English; some Russian.