Olivier was kind enough to provide this report trip on the French computational geometry days, as known as JGA 2010. The plenary speaker slides are online and worth a check.
The Journées de Géométrie Algorithmique are the main French-speaking meeting about computational Geometry. It is an informal workshop for the members of the French Computational Geometry community. The 2010 edition hold in Marseille in March 2010.
The meeting was split into two parts: lectures from invited speakers and short talks by meeting participants. We had the great pleasure to listen to 5 high-quality lecturers: Alexander Zvonkin, from University Bordeaux 1, spoke about Belyl functions and combinatorial maps; Claire Mathieu, from Brown University, made a very interesting course about linear programming and semi-definite programming methods; Francis Clarke, from University of Lyon 1, gave a lecture about non-smooth analysis and its applications. Albert Cohen, from University Paris 6, presented some results about theory and algorithms for anisotropic triangulations, with application to images. The lectures session ended with Jonathan R. Shewchuk, from the University of California Berkeley, who spoke on theoretically guaranteed mesh generation, making a survey of the whole literature, from basic Delaunay triangulations to last results on the field.
The talks covered a large variety of Computational Geometry related topics and I will simply give a few words about some talks that appeared particularly interesting to me. Primoz Skraba, from the INRIA Geometrica team in Saclay, described a clustering algorithm using persistent homology which allows, using some stability properties of the persistent diagram, to recover the right number of clusters with good spatial stability. Jean-Daniel Boissonnat, from the Geometrica group in Sophia, presented a certified algorithm for manifold reconstruction which has a linear complexity in the ambient dimension. It uses tangential Delaunay complexes and techniques of sliver removal to achieve this result. Julie Digne, from the CMLA lab of the ENS Cachan, showed a new strategy for segmentation of the meshing of a data point set. Given a scalar function, like the mean curvature, defined on the meshing, it uses a Maximally Stable Extremal Regions method to extract level set on the meshing. Thomas Iwaszko presented his work on a new variant of the Voronoi diagrams: he generalizes the empty-ball property of the classical diagrams to any shape (actually, a union of spheres) and study the resulting diagrams.
The next JGA will be held in 2012, due to the SoGC 2011 conference taking place in France.
Frank.
