Ming C. Lin
Ming Chien Lin is a Taiwanese-American computer scientist and a Barry Mersky and Capital One Endowed Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also the former chair of the Department of Computer Science. Prior to moving to Maryland in 2018, Lin was the John R. & Louise S. Parker Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at the University of [North Carolina at Chapel Hill].
Early life and education
Lin was born in Taiwan. Her family immigrated to the United States in 1980 and settled in California, where she attended Sunny Hills High School. After high school, she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with a Bachelor of Science in 1988, a Master of Science in 1991, and a Ph.D. in computer science and electrical engineering in 1993. She joined the UNC faculty in 1997.Career
Lin is known for her work on collision detection, and in particular for the Lin–Canny algorithm for maintaining the closest pair of features of two moving objects, for the idea of using axis-aligned bounding boxes to quickly eliminate from consideration pairs of objects that are far from colliding, and for additional speedups to collision detection using bounding box hierarchies. Her software libraries implementing these algorithms are widely used in commercial applications including computer aided design and computer games. More generally, her research interests are in physically based modeling, haptics, robotics, 3D computer graphics, computational geometry, and interactive computer simulation.Lin is the Editor in Chief Emeritus of IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. She is currently a member of the IEEE Computer Society Board of Governors and a member of Computing Research Association-Women Board of Directors.