Além da palestra, a visita científica busca estabelecer laços de cooperação nas áreas de interesse da UFBA e das Universidades de Illinois (UIUC) e Texas A&M, e contará com a presença dos pesquisadores Prof. Lawrence Rauchwerger (UIUC) e Profa. Dilma da Silva (Texas A&M).

A seguir, título e resumo da palestra e short bio dos pesquisadores em visita à UFBA.

Palestra: Sampling-Based Motion Planning: From Intelligent CAD to Crowd Simulation to Protein Folding

Abstract:
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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. For crowd simulation, we describe techniques for evacuation planning and for evaluating architectural designs. Finally, we describe our application of sampling-based motion planners to simulate molecular motions, such as protein and RNA folding.

Bio (Nancy Amato):
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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 Unocal Professor and Regents Professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University where she co-directed the Parasol Lab, and was also Senior Director of Engineering Honors Programs in the College of 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, 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.

Bio (Lawrence Rauchwerger):

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Lawrence Rauchwerger is the Eppright Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, and the co-Director of the Parasol Lab. He received an Engineer degree from the Polytechnic Institute Bucharest, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has held Visiting Faculty positions at the University of Illinois, Bell Labs, IBM T.J. Watson, and INRIA, Paris. Rauchwerger’s  approach to auto-parallelization, thread-level speculation and parallel code development has influenced industrial products at corporations such as IBM, Intel and Sun. Rauchwerger is an IEEE Fellow, an NSF CAREER award recipient and has chaired various IEEE and ACM conferences, most recently serving as Program Chair of PACT 2016 and PPoPP 2017. https://parasol.tamu.edu/~rwerger/

Bio (Dilma da Silva):

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Dilma Da Silva is a Professor and the Department Head for Computer Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University. Her primary research interests are cloud computing, operating systems, and high-end computing. Before joining Texas A&M, she worked at Qualcomm Research (2012-2014), IBM Research (2000-2012) and the University of Sao Paulo (1996-2000). Dilma is an ACM Distinguished Scientist, a member of the board of CRA-W (Computer Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research) and a co-founder of the Latinas in Computing group. She served as an officer at ACM SIGOPS from 2011 to 2015 and chaired the ACM Senior Award Committee in 2015. She is an Associate Editor for several journals and is on the steering committee of many conferences. She has chaired more than 30 conferences/workshops and participated in more than 100 program committees. She has published more than 80 technical papers and filed 15 patents. Dilma received a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech in 1997.