[Theory] 6/10 TTIC Colloquium: Nancy Amato, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

[Mary Marre]

*When:*      Monday, June 10th at 11:00 am



*Where:*     TTIC, 6045 S. Kenwood Avenue, 5th Floor, Room 526



*Who: *       Nancy Amato, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


*Title:     *   Sampling-Based Motion Planning: From Manipulators to
Intelligent CAD to Protein Folding

*Abstract:*
Motion planning has application in robotics, animation, virtual prototyping
and training, and even for seemingly unrelated tasks such as evaluating
architectural plans or simulating protein folding. Surprisingly,
sampling-based planning methods have proven effective on problems from all
these domains.  In this talk, we provide an overview of sampling-based
planning and describe some variants developed in our group, including
strategies suited for manipulation
planning and for user interaction.  For virtual prototyping, we show that
in some cases a hybrid system incorporating both an automatic planner and
haptic user input leads to superior results.  Finally, we  describe our
application of sampling-based motion planners to
simulate molecular motions, such as protein and RNA folding.

*Bio:*
Nancy M. Amato is Head of the Department of Computer Science and Abel Bliss
Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign.  Previously she was on the faculty of Texas A&M, where
she is currently Regents Professor Emerita of Computer Science and
Engineering.  Her main areas of research focus are robotics and motion
planning, computational biology and geometry, and parallel and distributed
computing.  She received undergraduate degrees in Mathematical Sciences and
Economics from Stanford University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer
Science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois, respectively.  She
is Vice President for Member Activities of the IEEE Robotics and Automation
Society (2018-2021), and she served as Program Chair for the 2015 IEEE
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) and for
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016.  She is an elected member of
the CRA Board of Directors (2014-2017, 2017-2020), was Co-Chair of
CRA-Women (2014-2017) and Co-Chair of the NCWIT Academic Alliance
(2009-2011), and has served on the Academic Advisory Council of AnitaB.org
since 2015.  Her honors include the CRA Habermann Award, the NCWIT Harrold
and Notkin Research and Graduate Mentoring Award, the IEEE
Hewlett-Packard/Harriet B. Rigas Award, and Texas A&M University-level
teaching (2011) and research (2018) awards.  She is a Fellow of the AAAI,
AAAS, ACM, and IEEE.

*Host:* Avrim Blum <avrim at ttic.edu>


For more information on the colloquium series or to subscribe to the
mailing list,please see http://www.ttic.edu/colloquium.php




Mary C. Marre
Administrative Assistant
*Toyota Technological Institute*
*6045 S. Kenwood Avenue*
*Room 517*
*Chicago, IL  60637*
*p:(773) 834-1757*
*f: (773) 357-6970*
*mmarre at ttic.edu <mmarre at ttic.edu>*
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