
Tao Hou
Assistant Professor
School of Computing
DePaul University
e-mail: thou1 at depaul dot edu
Announcement
- I am currently looking for a graduate student at DePaul to work on a data analysis project on neural science data using topological methods (see the paper for a sample of what the project may look like). The funding can be either through the Graduate Research Assistant Program or my summer research fund. I am expecting students to be proficient in C++ programming as well as some python. Knowing topology is not needed but you should have some basic sense of fundamental algorithms. Anyone interested is encouraged to contact me via email or visit me at my office CDM 712.
About
I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing, DePaul University. My research interest is computational topology/geometry and its application to data analysis. (My google scholar)
I graduated from the CS department at Purdue University with a doctoral degree in May 2022. My advisor for my PhD thesis is Dr. Tamal K. Dey. Before transferring to Purdue with Dr. Dey, I spent four years at The Ohio State University as a PhD student. The title of my PhD thesis is 'Homological Representatives in Topological Persistence'.
I received a B.E. degree in Software Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology, China, and a M.E. degree in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University, China. My master's thesis is concerning on-the-fly simplification and adaptive extraction of iso-surfaces from volume datasets. After finishing my master's degree, I went to work for 2 companies, Baidu and VMware, as software engineer, where I worked on search engines and communication protocols for remote desktops.
Publications

Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
arXiv preprint arXiv: 2302.12796 (2023)

Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
arXiv preprint arXiv: 2112.02352 (2022)
[github]

Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
European Symposium on Algorithms 2022
[github] [talk@ESA]
On Association between Absolute and Relative Zigzag Persistence

Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.00518 (2021)

Anand V. Patel, Tao Hou, Juan D. Beltran Rodriguez, Tamal K. Dey, and Dunbar P. Birnie III
Computational Materials Science, 202:110920, 2022

Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
International Symposium on Computational Geometry 2021
[talk@SoCG]

Tamal K. Dey*, Tao Hou*, and Sayan Mandal*
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 2020
[github] [talk@SODA]

Tamal K. Dey*, Tao Hou*, and Sayan Mandal*
Computational Topology in Image Context, International Workshop, 2019
[webpage] [talk@Ohio TDA Day]

Tao Hou and Li Chen
Journal of Visualization 19.4 (2016): 715-726
Invited Talks / Conference Presentations
Revisiting computation of zigzag persistence for new results Joint Math/CS Seminar, DePaul Univ. Feb 2023. Chicago, IL
Revisiting computation of zigzag persistence for new results TDA Seminar, Michigan State Univ. Dec 2022. East Lansing, MI
Fast Computation of Zigzag Persistence Computational Persistence Workshop 2022. Nov 2022. Purdue University (online)
Fast Computation of Zigzag Persistence ESA 2022. Sep 2022. Potsdam, Germany (online)
Topological Signatures for Data Analysis Aided by Homological Generators Seminar, DePaul University. Mar 2022. Chicago, IL
Topological Signatures for Data Analysis Aided by Homological Generators Seminar, North Carolina State University. Mar 2022. Raleigh, NC
Computing zigzag persistence on graphs in near-linear time Computational Persistence Workshop. Nov 2021. Purdue University (online)
Computing zigzag persistence on graphs in near-linear time SoCG 2021. Jun 2021. Buffalo, New York (online)
Computing minimal persistent cycles: polynomial and hard cases Seminar, Topology and Geometry for Data Analysis, Purdue University. Feb 2021. Online
Computing minimal persistent cycles: polynomial and hard cases Seminar, Applied Algebraic Topology Research Network. May 2020. Online
Computing minimal persistent cycles: polynomial and hard cases SODA 2020. Jan 2020. Salt Lake City, Utah
Persistent 1-cycles: definition, computation, and some applications Ohio TDA Day. July 2019. Dayton, Ohio
Teaching
CSC 421: Applied Algorithms and Structures, Winter 2023
CSC 421: Applied Algorithms and Structures, Fall 2022