CS 350 - Spring 2004

CS 350 Spring 2004: Syllabus

Here is a tentative syllabus.

Introduction to GIS. What is GIS? Applications of GIS. GIS and Computer Science. Research issues.
Geographic data representation. Points, lines, polygons. Rasters, TINs, contour lines.
C: Intro to C programming language.
- Input/output, loops, functions, call by value.
- C: Arrays and pointers in C. Dynamic allocation.
- C: File input/output.
- C: Command line arguments.
- C: Header files. Types. Structures.
- C: Makefiles.
- Graphics: OpenGL basics.
Topographic analysis. Flow modeling. Drainage networks. Watersheds.
Algorithms on TINs
- Storing and accessing a TIN. Traversing a TIN.
- Delaunay triangulation. Properties and construction (edge flipping, plane sweep, divide and conquer, incremental construction).
- Grid-to-TIN conversion.
- TIN point location.
- TIN overlay.
- Computing contour lines from TINs. Interval tree.
Curve simpification.
- Douglas-Peucker algorithm.
- Imai-Iri algorithm.
Terrain simplification/Map generalization.
- Refinement and decimation approaches.
Line-segment intersection
- Red-blue segment intersection.
- Line-segment intersection [Bentley and Ottmann algorithm].
Orthogonal range searching.
- 1-Dimensinal range searching.
- Quadtree.
- Kd-tree.
- Range tree.
- Grid file.
- Dynamization of spatial data structures.
Rectangle-rectangle searching
- R-tree.
- Spatial join.
Nearest-neighbor queries (using R-tree, kd-tree).
Window queries
- Segment tree.
Dealing with very large datasets
- Motivation. Scalability of algorithms to massive data. Experiments.
- RAM model limitations. Improved models. The I/O-model.
- External memory sorting.
- External memory priority queue.
- B-tree. (a,b)-tree.
- External memory basic graph algorithms.

Here is what actually happened.

Date	Topic	Notes, Reading, Assignments
Jan 26	Introduction to GIS. What is GIS? Applications of GIS. GIS and Computer Science. Intro to C programming language. C: Input/output, loops, functions, call by value.	L1.ppt. Chapter 1 K&R
Jan 29	Geographic data representation. Rasters, TINs, contour lines. C: Pointers.
Febr 3	C: Pointers. Pointer arithmetic. Command line arguments. Header files.	Assignment 1 (Doubly linked list with dummy head ddlist)
Febr 5	C: Dummy header doubly linked lists. scanf(). File I/O. Makefiles. Flow modeling on grid DEMs.	Assignment 2 (grid multiply). Flow.ppt
Febr 10	Unix tutorial. C: Makefiles. OpenGL--basics.	Unix tutorial, The Red Book, Assignment 3 (OpenGL warmup)
Febr 12	Assignment 3 demo. C:Makefiles. OpenGL--basics.	Assignment 4 (2D terrain rendering)
Febr 17	OpenGL: Transformations (rotation, translation). Flow modeling: flat areas.	Chapter 3(Viewing), Appendix G (Homog coord and transf. matrices)
Febr 19	Assignment 4 demo. OpenGL: Transformations (rotation, translation, scaling) and homogenous coordinates.	Assignment 5 (3D terrain rendering)
Febr 24	OpenGL: Order of transformations. Flow modeling: flat areas.
Febr 26	Assignment 5 demo. Flow modeling: Flat areas and flooding.	Assignment 6 (Flow modeling)
March 2	Flow modeling: Flow accumulation.	Project 1: Flow modeling on grid DEMs
March 4	Flow modeling: Flooding.	Flooding
March 9	Line simplification. Douglas-Peucker algorithm. Improvement to O(n lg n). Imai-Iri algorithm.	Speeding Up the Douglas-Peucker Line-Simplification Algorithm(Hershberger, Snoeyink)
March 11	Project 1 demo.	Fast Polygonal Approximation of terrain and height fields (M. Garland and P. Heckbert)
March 16, 18, 23, 25	Spring break!!
March 30	Imai-Iri algorithm. Improvement to O(n2). Grid-to-TIN transformation. Terrain simplification.	Project 2: Terrain simplification
April 1	Terrain simplification. Incremental refinemement and possible optimizations. Worst-case and average case analysis.
April 6	Terrain simplification. Decimation. Data structures for triangulation.
April 8	Dealing with very large data. Motivation. Scalability of algorithms to massive data. Experiments. RAM model limitations. The I/O-model. Analysis of flow direction and flow accumulation algorithms.
April 13	I/O-efficient sorting. I/O-efficient priority queue. I/O-efficient flow accumulation.
April 15	Project 2 demo [race and party].
April 20	Riccardo Schmid and Phillippe Alepin: Orthogonal range searching in 1D and 2D. The quadtree The kd-tree.	Demos: Point Quadtree PR quad tree Kd-tree Construction of 2D kd-tree
April 22	Wyatt Dumas and Greydon Foil: Line-segment intersection - the Bentley-Ottmann sweep.	Lecture notes (M. Schmid) Demos: demo 1 \| demo 2
April 27	Pat Donahue and Somboon Chiewcharnpipat: From point sample to TIN: The Delaunay triangulation. Properties. Algorithms.
April 29	Nick Troy and Richard Hoang: Computing contour lines on TINs. Brute force method. The interval tree.	Efficient methods for isoline extraction from a TIN M. van Kreveld. Int. J. of GIS, 10:523--540, 1996
May 4	Visit DeLorme
May 6	Jon Todd, Brendan Dickinson and Nick Powell: Computing the convex hull of a point set in 2D. The brute-force method. Gift wrapping. Quickhull. Graham's scan. Lower bound.
May 11	[Grad school]	Choosing a grad school Who wants to be a Ph.D? GRE general \| Practice test GRE subject
May 21	Final exam: project demo (9-12, Linux Lab)