I am an associate-professor in the 3D geoinformation research group at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands.
I hold a PhD in computer science from the University of South Wales in the UK (details of my PhD thesis), and a BSc in Geomatics Engineering from the Université Laval in Québec City, Canada.
For my research, I am particularly interested in combining the fields of GIS and computational geometry. Put simply, I often try to solve geographical problems—either in 2D or in 3D—by first decomposing the world into triangles/tetrahedra or into another tessellation such as the Voronoi diagram. My work involves developing topological data structures to store these tessellations, and designing algorithms to analyse and extract information from the datasets. I strongly believe in implementing my research ideas, the source code of my projects is freely available under open-source licences (overview of the software I develop and maintain).
I am on the editorial board of The Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS), a very special multi-disciplinary journal that promotes open source software.
I am currently working, among others, on storing efficiently 3D city models with CityJSON (which I started, and I am one of the editors), on the reconstruction of global elevation models with “space lidar”, the validation and the automatic repair of polygons and polyhedra as found in GIS, the semantic classification of urban textured meshes, and the impact of buildings’ LoDs in CFD predictions.
Teaching-wise, I am involved in the courses Digital terrain modelling and 3D modelling of the built environment (both courses are open, with YouTube videos and open-access books) in the MSc Geomatics programme at TU Delft. For some years already, I’ve been using only free and open-source software for the labs, eg rasterio, CGAL, cjio, startinpy, etc.