Meet the Faculty - Ravi Janardan

Tell us about your journey to the University of Minnesota.

I'm from India and I got my undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering there. This was back in the late 1970s and around that time, my university acquired a mainframe computer. Computers were not that widespread back then, so they made the mainframe available to students to program. I started doing some Fortran programming and was hooked! For me, the fact that you could write a short piece of code and have it do quite complex tasks was fascinating.

I decided to take the leap and switch fields to computer science, so I enrolled in the master's program at the same university and got my first taste of research (in cryptography). Then I applied for graduate studies in the United States and came to Purdue for my PhD, which was in graph algorithms. That was between 1982 and 1987. My time there convinced me that I wanted to spend my professional life in academia. After I graduated, I interviewed at several universities and was offered a position here at the University of Minnesota. I've been here ever since and it's been a wonderful ride!

We would love to hear more about your research!

My research centers around the design and analysis of efficient computer algorithms and their application to real-world problems. Within this larger context, my focus is on discrete geometric problems, i.e., problems that are defined over a large collection of geometric entities, such as points, lines, polygons, polytopes, etc. These entities "live" in an ambient coordinate space and have attributes such as position, orientation, shape, and size that may change over time. I am interested in questions having to do with modeling such entities, computing certain configurations formed by them, investigating certain types of interactions between them, and querying them to identify certain properties. The goal is to do these things in a way that is efficient in the use of time and storage resources.

This area is called computational geometry and it finds natural applications in diverse areas, including computer-aided design and manufacture, robotics, VLSI layout design, spatio-temporal databases, biology, and medicine (among others).

What do you hope to accomplish with this work? What is the real-world impact for the average person?

The life-cycle of my projects typically includes abstraction and modeling of real-world problems, design and analysis of correct, efficient, and practical algorithms and data structures, implementation and evaluation of these on real-world datasets, and deploying the solutions into the appropriate application domain. We have found success in applications such as process planning for 3D printing, pre-operative planning for minimally-invasive surgery (in urology), and for automated treatment planning in orthodontics.

This work has involved collaboration with local industry and with the Medical and Dental Schools at the U of M, and has resulted in technology transfer, IP disclosures, and software licensing. On the theoretical side, our work has resulted in solutions to some open problems in computational geometry and has also introduced to the field a new type of generalized query processing that has attracted a fair bit of attention due to its real-world applications.

What courses are you teaching this fall? What can students expect to get out of that class?

This fall I’m teaching CSCI 5421, which is the advanced algorithms and data structures course. The course teaches students fundamental algorithm design techniques, data organization techniques, and analysis methods, as well as techniques for coping with problems that are known to be computationally challenging.

In the spring I am teaching CSCI 2011, which is about discrete structures and exposes students to fundamental concepts such as logic, proofs, sets, counting, recursion, and graphs. Besides their intrinsic beauty, these are concepts that students will need to master to do well in downstream courses in the department.

I am also teaching CSCI 8442 in the spring, which is a course about computational geometry. This is more of a research-oriented course for graduate students and I view it as a training ground for my PhD students.

What do you do outside of the classroom for fun?

I love sports. Back in India, I was a competitive badminton player and I played for many years. Now, my knees don't quite hold up, so I've switched to something more gentle, namely pickleball, which my wife and I have started playing regularly. I also enjoy watching sports, and follow the four major sports - football, basketball, hockey, and baseball. We are blessed here in the Twin Cities to have all of those both at the collegiate and professional level. I'm an avid fan of all of our teams, especially Gopher football and the Vikings!

I like to go hiking. My wife and I try to go hiking in national parks as often as we can. We’ve covered a few of them and hope to do more. I also love doing recreational puzzles, which is kind of a natural extension of my research in algorithm design.

For the longest time, I've been a do-it-yourselfer, so I like to putter around the house fixing things. Anything to do with painting, plumbing, electrical work, carpentry, landscaping, and car maintenance - but nothing major or dangerous. I usually watch a lot of YouTube videos, pick up the skills, and then try to do it on my own. It’s a nice break from my day job.

Do you have a favorite spot in the city?

Anything to do with water! I enjoy being by large bodies of water like the South Minneapolis lakes - Calhoun, Bde Maka Ska, Lake of the Isles, and Lake Nokomis - as well as Lake Minnetonka in the west metro. I like spending time by the Mississippi as well - it’s calming. When I'm on campus, I typically walk down to the river area just behind Coffman Union or to the Stone Arch Bridge in downtown and spend an hour or so there just watching the water flow by.

Anything else?

I'm always happy to chat with students about things beyond my teaching and research. One thing that students may not know about me is that I've chaired our faculty search committee in the department for nine years now, so I have a lot of insight into faculty hiring. Students who are interested in getting into academia can come and talk to me about the hiring process and what to do and what not to do. I'm more than happy to sit down with them and give them some tips.