Lydia E. Kavraki is the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science at Rice University. She also holds a joint appointment at the Department of Bioengineering at Rice and the Department of Structural and Computational Biology and Molecular Biophysics at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Kavraki received a B.A. in Computer Science from the University of Crete in Greece, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University. Kavraki's research contributions are in physical algorithms and their applications in robotics, computational structural biology, and bioinformatics. In robotics she has made seminal contributions in robot motion planning, assembly planning, micromanipulation using microelectromechanical systems, and flexible object manipulation. In structural computational biology, Kavraki has pioneered an algorithmic framework for modeling receptor-ligand interactions, has worked on computer-assisted drug design and the large-scale functional annotation of proteins. A unifying theme in her work is the investigation of algorithms and system architectures for solving complex geometric problems with physical constraints that arise in the real world.
Kavraki has authored more than seventy peer-reviewed journal and conference publications, has served as the co-editor of one book, and is one of the authors of a textbook on robotics to be published in 2004 by MIT Press. She served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation from 2000 to 2002; and currently is an associate editor for the IEEE Robotics Magazine, the IEEE Transactions on Computational Biology and Bioinformatics and a member of the editorial advisory board of the Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics. Kavraki was the recipient of the 2000 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her work on path planning. She has also received a National Science Foundation CAREER award, a Sloan Fellowship, and the Early Academic Career Award from the IEEE Society on Robotics and Automation and the Duncan Award for excellence in research and teaching from Rice University. Kavraki was included in the list of Top 100 Young Innovators of the MIT Technology Review Magazine in 2002. She was inducted to the College of Fellows of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in 2004.
More information on Kavraki's work can be found in: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~kavraki
Talk title:
From Robots to Biomolecules: Computing about the Physical World.
Abstract:
Probabilistic RoadMaps (PRMs) have enjoyed widespread success in the robotics path planning community and have fueled significant research developments. Our laboratory has pioneered PRM methods and their application to problems ranging from planning for multiple robots to planning for elastic parts. This talk will discuss the paradigm shift that our research has caused in the path planning community and our related robotics projects.
In our recent work, we use the experience we have gained through PRMs to develop algorithms that reason about molecular shape and motion. We will show how to exploit robotics methods to analyze the flexibility of molecules, to obtain low dimensional representations of molecular motion, and to predict biomolecular interactions. The implications of our work to drug discovery will then be discussed.
Our research represents a new trend in computing which is the development of algorithms for solving complex high-dimensional geometric problems arising in the physical world. We will highlight the challenges we face as well as the opportunities we have to impact computer science, molecular biology, and medicine.