School of Engineering

W. Randolph Franklin
Professor
http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/Homepages/wrf/

Department Affiliation:

Department of Electrical, Computer, & Systems Engineering

Education:

Ph.D., Harvard University
Applied Mathematics

M.A., Harvard University
Applied Mathematics

B.S., University of Toronto
Computer Science

Background:

Dr. Franklin has held visiting positions at UC Berkeley, the US Army Topographic Engineering Center, Ft Belvoir, the Dipartimento di Informatica e Scienze dell'Informazione, Universita di Genova, Italy, the Dept. de Science Geodesique, University of Laval, Quebec City, Canada, the Division of Information Technology, Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Canberra, Australia, and the Institute of Systems Science, National Univer sity of Singapore. He also helped found two defunct hi-tech startups, Hudson Data Systems, and Attic Graphics, Inc. He is an incorporator and board member of the Institute for Infrastructure Asset Management.

Read More: http://www.ecse.rpi.edu/Homepages/wrf/

Research Interests:

Franklin's current research interests include computational cartography, computer graphics, computational geometry, and geographic information science, emphasizing small, simple, and fast data structures and algorithms, tested on the largest possible datasets.

Franklin likes to write very efficient algorithms and data structures to quickly process large data sets. Examples include finding connected components in a 600x600x600 cellular universe, finding closest points among 20,000,000 points in the plane, and finding mass properties of the union of 20,000,000 cubes.

Other recent projects, with both civilian and military applications, include multiple observer siting on terrain while maintaining intervisibility, and new basis functions to represent terrain compactly.