The 18th Fall Workshop in Computational Geometry (FWCG) is a regional workshop, economical for researchers in eight states to attend, including those without travel budgets, such as faculty at teaching colleges, grad students, and members of underrepresented groups. Computational geometry has rapidly emerged as a field of intense research in computer science and many related disciplines. Since many of the computations associated with both real and simulated physical systems are geometric in nature, research in this field has been fueled by applications in computational molecular biology, computer graphics, geometric modeling, sensor networks, engineering design, manufacturing, robotics, machine vision, data mining, and statistics. Therefore advances in computational geometry improve the economic competitiveness of the United States.
The workshop is being held at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy NY, Oct 31 - Nov 1, 2008. It will enhance the careers of junior researchers by being large enough for interesting people to be present, but small enough for them to be accessible. Half of the NSF support is for subsidizing grad students and underrepresented groups. An example of computational geometry's importance is the Voronoi diagram, a fundamental data structure. It facilitates predicting protein docking in computational biology, which leads to better drug design. Computational geometry is also of importance to various mission agencies. The National Science Foundation's support has a unique role, enabling the more fundamental and basic research that their applied research and advanced development relies on.
