Tao Hou
Assistant Professor
School of Computing
DePaul University
e-mail: thou1 at depaul dot edu

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

Computing Zigzag Vineyard Efficiently Including Expansions and Contractions
Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
arXiv preprint arXiv: 2307.07462 (2023)
Revisiting Graph Persistence for Updates and Efficiency
Tamal K. Dey*, Tao Hou*, and Salman Parsa*
18th Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium (WADS 2023),
[talk@WADS]
Updating Barcodes and Representatives for Zigzag Persistence
Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
arXiv preprint arXiv: 2112.02352 (2022)
[github]
Fast Computation of Zigzag Persistence
Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
European Symposium on Algorithms 2022
[github] [talk@ESA]
* A previous version on arXiv targeting a slightly different topic:
On Association between Absolute and Relative Zigzag Persistence
Computing Optimal Persistent Cycles for Levelset Zigzag on Manifold-like Complexes
Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.00518 (2021)
Topological Filtering for 3D Microstructure Segmentation
Anand V. Patel, Tao Hou, Juan D. Beltran Rodriguez, Tamal K. Dey, and Dunbar P. Birnie III
Computational Materials Science, 202:110920, 2022
Computing Zigzag Persistence on Graphs in Near-Linear Time
Tamal K. Dey* and Tao Hou*
International Symposium on Computational Geometry 2021
[talk@SoCG]
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.)

Invited Talks / Conference Presentations

Revisiting Graph Persistence for Updates and Efficiency
WADS. Jul 2023. Montreal, QC

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. Nov 2022. Purdue University (online)

Fast Computation of Zigzag Persistence
ESA. 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. 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. Jan 2020. Salt Lake City, Utah

Persistent 1-cycles: definition, computation, and some applications
Ohio TDA Day. July 2019. Dayton, Ohio

Teaching

CSC 301: Data Structures II. Fall 2024
CSC 421: Applied Algorithms and Structures. Fall 2024; Spring -- Fall 2023