taohou

taohou
Full Name
Tao Hou
First Name
Tao
Last Name
Hou
Affiliation
Faculty
Title
Assistant Professor
Phone
541-346-1019
Office
333 Deschutes
Departments
Computer Science
Interests
Topological Data Analysis, Computational Topology, Topological Machine Learning, Theoretical Computer Science
Website
https://taohou01.github.io/
Profile Section
Biography

Dr. Tao Hou is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oregon. Before joining UO in Sep 2024, he was an Assistant Professor in the School of Computing at DePaul University since Jun 2022. He obtained his doctoral degree in May 2022 from the Department of Computer Science at Purdue University. His PhD thesis is on 'Homological Representatives in Topological Persistence'. He got his Master's degree in Software Engineering from Tsinghua University (China) in 2013 and his Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering from Beijing Institute of Technology (China) in 2010. After obtaining his master's degree, he worked in the industry as a software engineer in China for three years for companies such as VMware Inc. and Baidu Inc.

Research
A major concern of Dr. Hou's research field, topological data analysis (TDA), is on understanding the 'shape' of data in a theoretically rigorous way through the mathematical lens of algebraic topology. He has also been actively engaging in applications of his research to interdisciplinary problems and to other fields in computer science such as visualization and geometry processing. He is especially interested in the interplay of TDA with machine learning given that the contemporary machine learning algorithms typically focus on the geometrical properties of data. This provides vast opportunities for finding ways to exploit the data's topological attributes on how points in the spaces connect to themselves.
 
Besides applications, a major achievement of Dr. Hou's theoretical research is on the complexity for computing certain important descriptors in TDA. Specifically, with collaborators, he has improved the time bound for the computation of the topological descriptor called Zigzag Persistence on several problems including: (1) computing the barcode from a zigzag filtration; (2) computing zigzag barcodes for graph filtrations; (3) updating zigzag persistence over local changes; (4) updating zigzag persistence for graph filtrations; (5) computing representatives for zigzag.
Updated

Member for

4 months