About

Ph.D. Student
Department of Computer Science
Purdue University
e-mail: taohou01 at gmail.com

I am a 5th year PhD student in the CS department of Purdue, advised by Tamal K. Dey. Before transferring to Purdue with my advisor, I spent four unforgettable years in The Ohio State University. My research focus is computational topology/geometry, and its application to data analysis.

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 I finished my master's degree, I went to work for 2 companies, Baidu and VMware, as a software engineer.

Teaching Assistant

CSE 6332: Advanced Algorithms, Grader (Helped on some lecturing), Spring 2019
CSE 3341: Principles of Programming Languages, Grader, Autumn 2018
CSE 2111: Spreadsheets & DBs, Lab Instructor, Spring/Autumn 2017
CSE 2321: Discrete Structures, Grader, Autumn 2016
CSE 2331: Data Structures & Algorithms, Grader, Autumn 2016

Publications

Computing Zigzag Persistence on Graphs in Near-Linear Time
Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
International Symposium on Computational Geometry 2021, to appear
Computing Minimal Persistent Cycles: Polynomial and Hard Cases
Tamal K. Dey*, Tao Hou*, and Sayan Mandal*
ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms 2020
[github] [talk@SODA]
Persistent 1-Cycles: Definition, Computation, and Its Application
Tamal K. Dey*, Tao Hou*, and Sayan Mandal*
Computational Topology in Image Context, International Workshop, 2019
[webpage] [talk@Ohio TDA Day]
On-the-fly simplification of large iso-surfaces with per-cube vertex modifiability detection
Tao Hou and Li Chen
Journal of Visualization 19.4 (2016): 715-726
(Names ending with * means that authors are ordered alphabetically.)