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Photograph of Angela Wu

Angela Wu Prof Emerita Computer Science

Degrees
PhD, Computer Science, University of Maryland College Park<br> MS, Mathematics, Cornell University<br>BS, Mathematics, Villanova University

Languages Spoken
Chinese
Bio
Angela Wu received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Maryland at College Park in 1978. From 1978 to 1980, she was an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. In 1980 she joined the faculty of American University as an Associate Professor and became a Full Professor in 1985. Her research and publications cover a wide range of areas including computer vision, parallel algorithms and computational geometry. She is particularly interested in algorithms and data structures for geometric problems with applications in image processing and pattern recognition. In 1993, Dr. Wu co-founded the Annual Vision Geometry Conference to promote the use of geometric techniques in computer vision, and she served as Conference Chair for 15 years. Since 1998, Dr. Wu has been on the Executive Council of Upsilon Pi Epsilon, the International Honor Society for Computing Sciences. She was International President of Upsilon Pi Epsilon in 2008.
For the Media
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Partnerships & Affiliations


  • Executive Council Member, (1998 – 2010);  International President (2002-2003, 2008-2009)

  • George Washington University Computer Science Department
    Computer Science External Advisory Board (2003 – 2005)

Scholarly, Creative & Professional Activities

Research Interests

  • Dr. Wu’s research and publications cover a wide range of areas including computer vision, parallel algorithms and computational geometry.  She is particularly interested in algorithms and data structures for geometric problems with applications in image processing and pattern recognition.

Honors, Awards, and Fellowships

  • American University Mellon Distinguished Award for Senior Faculty, 1988
  • American University College of Arts and Sciences Award for Outstanding Teaching, 1997

Selected Publications

  • “A practical approximation algorithm for the LMS line estimator”, Computational Statistics & Data Analysis, Volume 51, Issue 5, 1 (2007), 2461-2486.
  • “A Local Search Approximation Algorithm for k-Means Clustering”, Journal of Computational Geometry: Theory and Applications Vol. 28 (2004), 89-112
  • “An efficient k-means clustering algorithm: analysis and implementation”, IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 24, (2002), 881-892.
  • “Approximating large convolutions in digital images”, IEEE Trans. Image Processing (2001), 1826-2835.
  • “ Parallel image processing”, Foundations of Image Understanding, L. S. Davis, ed., Kluwer Academic (2001), 157-180
  • “Centers of sets of pixels”, Discrete Applied Mathematics 103, (2000), 297-306.
  • "An Optimal Algorithm for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Searching Fixed Dimensions", Journal of the ACM 45, 6 (1998), 891-923.
  • "Embedding of tree networks into hypercubes", Interconnection Networks For High-Performance Parallel Computers, I. D. Scherson and A. S. Youssef, Eds. IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, CA, (1994), 532-543.