Prof. Ming C. Lin is an American computer scientist, the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university located in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States...

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Research

Lin is known for her work on collision detection

Collision detection

Collision detection typically refers to the computational problem of detecting the intersection of two or more objects. While the topic is most often associated with its use in video games and other physical simulations, it also has applications in robotics...

, and in particular for the Lin–Canny algorithm for maintaining the closest pair of features of two moving objects, for the idea (with Cohen, Manocha, and Ponamgi) of using axis-aligned bounding boxes to quickly eliminate from consideration pairs of objects that are far from colliding, and for additional speedups to collision detection using bounding box hierarchies

Bounding volume hierarchy

A bounding volume hierarchy is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects are wrapped in bounding volumes that form the leaf nodes of the tree. These nodes are then grouped as small sets and enclosed within larger bounding volumes...

. Her software libraries implementing these algorithms are widely used in commercial applications including computer aided design and computer games. More generally, her research interests are in physically based modeling, haptics, robotics

Robotics

Robotics is the branch of technology that deals with the design, construction, operation, structural disposition, manufacture and application of robots...

, 3D computer graphics

3D computer graphics

3D computer graphics are graphics that use a three-dimensional representation of geometric data that is stored in the computer for the purposes of performing calculations and rendering 2D images...

, computational geometry

Computational geometry

Computational geometry is a branch of computer science devoted to the study of algorithms which can be stated in terms of geometry. Some purely geometrical problems arise out of the study of computational geometric algorithms, and such problems are also considered to be part of computational...

, and interactive

Interactivity

In the fields of information science, communication, and industrial design, there is debate over the meaning of interactivity. In the "contingency view" of interactivity, there are three levels:...

 computer simulation

Computer simulation

A computer simulation, a computer model, or a computational model is a computer program, or network of computers, that attempts to simulate an abstract model of a particular system...

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Biography

Lin did her graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 before joining the UNC faculty in 1997.
She is the Editor in Chief of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. She is married to her frequent collaborator and UNC faculty colleague, Dinesh Manocha

Dinesh Manocha

Prof. Dinesh Manocha is an American computer scientist, the Phi Delta Theta/Matthew Mason Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill...

; she was hired at UNC in the same year, 1997, that Manocha was tenured there.

Awards and honors

In 2003, UNC gave Lin their Hettleman Prize for Scholarly and Artistic Achievements, and in 2007, she was named as the Beverly W. Long Distinguished Professor. She has won many best-paper awards for her research, and was given the IEEE Visualization and Graphics Technical Committee 2010 Virtual Reality Technical Achievement Award "in recognition of her seminal contributions in the area of interactive physics-based interaction and simulation for virtual environments."

External links

• Ming C. Lin home page at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• GAMMA research group at the Department of Computer Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill