Dr. Nancy M. Amato, Unocal Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, was invited to speak at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference hosted by the University of California, Berkeley last month. Amato's talk was titled "Using Motion Planning to Study Protein Motions."
In her talk she described how techniques developed for motion planning in robotics have been adapted and applied to model and analyze protein motions and to reason about the structure, flexibility and interactions of proteins and other biomolecules.
The conference is a single-track conference that brings together researchers working on algorithmic and mathematical foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotic systems. The program included invited talks, oral and poster presentations of refereed papers, workshops, and tutorials. Each talk that took place during the conference was recorded and is on the website, along with all technical papers.
The invited speakers for the conference include Genevieve Bell of Intel, Brad Nelson of ETH Zurich, Andrew Ng of Stanford University and Chris Urmson of Google. Dr. Dylan Shell, assistant professor in Texas A&M's Department of Computer Science and Engineering, was an area chair for the conference.
The conference also included workshops organized by Texas A&M associated individuals. Dr. Aaron Ames, joint faculty member of mechanical engineering and computer science and engineering at Texas A&M, organized a workshop titled “Dynamic Locomotion." Lydia Tapia, a graduate of Texas A&M's computer science and engineering program who is now an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, was also an organizer of a workshop at the conference on Robotics Methods for Structural and Dynamic Modeling of Molecular Systems.
Amato co-directs the CSE Parasol Lab and her research focuses are motion planning and robotics, computational biology and geometry and parallel and distributed computing. She received undergraduate degrees in mathematical sciences and economics from Stanford University, and a master's and Ph.D. degree in computer science from UC Berkeley and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.