Patrice Belleville

As an instructor, part of my responsibilities include curriculum development. I am thus interested in improving the manner in which we communicate knowledge to our students, as well as in selecting the information we provide, and in organizing it to better prepare the student for work in industry or further education. In particular, I want to find ways to provide additional information that is not, strictly speaking, part of the curriculum, in a manner that will motivate the students to access it (and learn it). I also plan to investigate ways to use animations to help students gain a better understanding of algorithms and data structures. My other main interest is computational geometry: a branch of computer science that studies algorithms for solving geometric problems. More specifically, my research has been focused on visibility and covering problems, as well as on geometric probing (how does a robot determine which object it is looking at, given some geometric information about that object?). Finally, I also study graph-theoretic problems, and efficient algorithms to solve them, as well as data structures.