NANCY M. AMATO

Professor and OSIS Head

Email: amato@cs.tamu.edu
Phone: 979/862-2275  Fax: 979/847-8578
Office: HRBB 414B
http://parasol.tamu.edu/people/amato

Ph.D. Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1995
M.S. Computer Science, University of California at Berkeley, 1988
B.S. Mathematical Sciences, Stanford University, 1986
A.B. Economics, Stanford University, 1986

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Motion planning, computational biology, robotics, computational geometry, animation, CAD, VR, parallel and distributed computing, parallel algorithms, performance modeling, and optimization

SELECTED RESEARCH SUPPORT

"SmartApps: Middle-ware for Adaptive Applications on Reconfigurable Platforms," The Department of Energy, Office of Science (Operating/Runtime Systems for Extreme Scale Scientific Computation Program), 09/2004-08/2007.

"ITR/NGS: STAPL: A Software Infrastructure for Computational Biology and Physics" (ACI-0326350), The National Science Foundation (Medium ITR Program), 11/2003-10/2007.

"ITR/AP: A Motion Planning Approach for Protein Folding Simulation" (CCR-0113974), National Science Foundation, 9/2001-8/2005.

"ITR: An Adaptive Wavefront Construction Algorithm for Optimal Seismic Ray Tracing" (ACR-0081510), National Science Foundation, 9/2000-8/2005.

"Efficient Massively-Parallel Implementation of Modern Deterministic Transport Calculations," (B347886), Department of Energy (ASCI ASAP Level 2 Program), 10/1999-12/2006

AWARDS

Distinguished Lecturer, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, 2006-2007

Halliburton Professorship Award, College of Engineering, 2006

Fellow, World Technology Network, 2005

TEES Fellow Award, College of Engineering, Texas A&M University, 2001, 2004

Unicol Endowed Professorship in Engineering, Texas A&M University, 2001-2004

NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award, 1996-2000

Lockheed Martin Engineering Teaching Award, College of Engineering, Texas A&M, 1999

Diversity Award, Provost's Office, and Womens' Week Faculty Award, Texas A&M, 1998

TEES Select Young Faculty Award, College of Engineering, Texas A&M, 1997

Montague Center for Teaching Excellence Scholar, Texas A&M, 1997

ACM Award for Teaching Excellence (voted by students), CS Dept, Spring 1997

AT&T Bell Laboratories Ph.D. Scholar, 1993-1994

EXPERIENCE

Professor, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, 9/2004 - present

Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, 9/2000-8/2004

Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science, Texas A&M University, 1/1995-8/2000

Sabbatical Visitor, University of Padova, Italy, 9/2004-11/2004

Academic Visitor, IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY, 9/2003-8/2004

Member, Molecular Biophysics Training Program Faculty (2001-present)

Co-Director, Parasol Laboratory (1998-present)

Visiting Scientist, International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, Fall 1994

Visiting Scientist, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ, Summer 1994

Member of Technical Staff, Bell Communications Research, Piscataway, NJ, 1986-1988

PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES AND SERVICE

Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing, 1/2002-Present.

Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation, 7/2001-7/2004.

Guest Editor, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing. Special Issue on High-Performance Computational Biology, to appear 2006. (Co-editors David Bader and Srinivas Aluru.)

Guest Editor, International Journal on Robotics Research (IJRR). Special Issue on Robotics Techniques Applied to Computational Biology, to appear 2005. (Co-editors Greg Chirikjian and Lydia Kavraki.)

Guest Editor, Robotics and Autonomous Systems Journal (RAS), an Elsevier journal. Special Issue of selected papers from the 8th Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8), to appear 2005. (Co-editors Andrea Bonarini and Eiichi Yoshida.)

Guest Editor, Theory of Computer Systems, Special Issue of Selected SPAA 2001 Papers.

NIH Study Section Member: Special Study Section SSS-H (90) on Computational Biology (6/2003, 11/2003). Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA) study section (3/2004).

NSF Cyber-Enabled Chemistry Workshop, October 2004.

NSF BIO Advisory Committee Workshop on Cyberinfrastructure (CI) for the Biological Sciences, July 2003.

NRC ARLTAB Robotics Review, member of committee organized by the National Research Council's (NRC) Army Research Laboratory Technical Assessment Board (ARLTAB) to review the ARL's robotics activities, May 2004.

CRA-W Committee Member: serving on CRA Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W) as co-coordinator of the Distributed Mentor Project, 9/2000-Present. (See http://www.cra.org for details.)

Conference Co-Chair, 7th Intern. Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2006.

Program Committee Chair, 4th IEEE Intern. Workshop on High Performance Computational Biology (HiCOMB 2005).

Program Committee Co-Chair (for USA), Eighth Intern. Conference on Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS-8), 2004.

Program Committee Chair for Invited Talks, Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, 2004.

Local Arrangements Chair, 16th Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC'03), College Station, Texas, October 2003.

Program Committee Member (selected):

Euro-Par 2004, Vice-Chair Topic 13 (Theory and Algor. for Parallel Computation), 2004

Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC), 2003, 2004.

IEEE/RSJ Intern. Conf. of Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2003, 2004, 2005.

IEEE Intern. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2002, 2003, 2005.

Intern. Conf. on Parallel Processing (ICPP), 2002, 2003.

Intern. Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), 2000, 2002.

Intern. Parallel & Distributed Processing Symp. (IPDPS), 2000, 2002.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, 2002.

4th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX), 2002.

13th Annual ACM Symp. on Parallel Algorithms and Architectures (SPAA), 2001.

17th Annual ACM Symp. on Computational Geometry (SoCG), 2001.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

X. Tang, B. Kirkpatrick, S. Thomas, G. Song, N. M. Amato, "Using Motion Planning to Study RNA Folding Kinetics," Journal of Computational Biology, 12(6), pp. 862-881, 2005.

J.-M. Lien and N.M. Amato, "Approximate Convex Decomposition of Polygons," Proc. of the 20th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG), June 2004, pp. 17-26. Invited submission to special issue of Computational Geometry: Theory & Applications featuring selected papers from SoCG 2004.

D. Xie and N. M. Amato, "A Kinematics-Based Probabilistic Roadmap Method for High DOF Closed Chain Systems," Proc. of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 473-478, 2004.

N.M. Amato, K. A. Dill, and G. Song, "Using Motion Planning to Map Protein Folding Landscapes and Analyze Folding Kinetics of Known Native Structures," special issue of selected papers from RECOMB 2002, Journal of Computational Biology, vol. 10(3-4), pp. 239-256, 2004.

O. B. Bayazit, J.-M. Lien, N. M. Amato, "Better Group Behaviors in Complex Environments using Global Roadmaps," Proc. Artificial Life VIII: 8th Intern. Conf. on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE 8), December 2002, pp. 362-370. A related paper appeared in Proc. 10th Pacific Conference on Computer Graphics and Applications, (Pacific Graphics), pp. 104-113, October 2002.

P. An, A. Jula, S. Rus, S. Saunders, T. Smith, G. Tanase, N. Thomas, N. M. Amato, L. Rauchwerger, "STAPL: An Adaptive, Generic Parallel C++ Library," Proc. of the 14th Workshop on Languages and Compilers for Parallel Computing (LCPC), Cumberland Falls, KY, August 2001. Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS), Springer-Verlag.