Nancy M. Amato

Nancy Marie Amato is an American computer scientist noted for her research on the algorithmic foundations of motion planning, computational biology, computational geometry and parallel computing.[1] Amato is the Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering and Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[2] Amato is noted for her leadership in broadening participation in computing, and is currently a member of the steering committee of CRA-WP (formerly known as CRA-W), of which she has been a member of the board since 2000.

Nancy Amato
Born
Nancy Marie Amato

Portland, Oregon, US
NationalityAmerican
Alma materUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (PhD)
University of California, Berkeley (MS)
Stanford University (BS)
Known forMotion planning
Computational biology
Computational geometry
Parallel computing
Animation
Distributed computing
Parallel algorithms
Performance modeling and optimization
AwardsIEEE Fellow (2010)
AAAI Fellow (2018)
ACM Fellow (2015)
Scientific career
FieldsComputer Science
InstitutionsTexas A&M University
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ThesisReversing trains : a turn of the century sorting problem (1988)
Doctoral advisorFranco P. Preparata
Websitecs.illinois.edu/directory/profile/namato
engineering.tamu.edu/cse/profiles/namato.html

Education

Amato received both a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematical Sciences from Stanford University in 1986.[2] She received an MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1988, with advisor Manuel Blum.[3] In 1995, she received a PhD in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign under advisor Franco P. Preparata for her thesis "Parallel Algorithms for Convex Hulls and Proximity Problems".[2]

Career and research

She joined the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University as an assistant professor in 1995. She was promoted to associate professor in 2000, to professor in 2004, and to Unocal professor in 2011.

In July 2018, Amato was named the next head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, starting in January 2019.[4][5]

Amato has several notable results. Her paper on probabilistic roadmap methods (PRMs) is one of the most important papers on PRM. It describes the first PRM variant that does not use uniform sampling in the robot's configuration space.[6] She wrote a seminal paper with one of her students that shows how the PRM methodology can be applied to protein motions, and in particular protein folding. This approach has opened up a new research area in computational biology.[7] This result opens up a rich new set of applications for this technique in computational biology. Another paper she wrote with her students represents a major advance by showing how global energy landscape statistics, such as relative folding rates and population kinetics, can be computed for proteins from the approximate landscapes computed by Amato's PRM-based method.[8] In another paper, she and a student introduced a novel technique, approximate convex decomposition (ACD), for partitioning a polyhedron into approximately convex pieces.[9] Amato also co-leads the STAPL project with her husband Lawrence Rauchwerger, who is also a computer scientist on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. STAPL is a parallel C++ library.[10]

Awards and honors

Her notable awards include:

References
  1. Nancy M. Amato publications indexed by Google Scholar
  2. "Nancy M. Amato". cs.illinois.edu/about/people/faculty/namato. Retrieved 2021-12-12.
  3. "Nancy Amato is first woman to lead UI computer science department". eecs.berkeley.edu. 25 July 2018. Retrieved 2020-05-31.
  4. "Nancy Amato Named Next Department Head of Computer Science". Retrieved 13 Jul 2018.
  5. "Robotics expert to be first woman to lead UI computer-science department". Retrieved 13 Jul 2018.
  6. Nancy M. Amato; Osman B. Bayazit; Lucia K. Dale; Christopher Jones & Daniel Vallejo (1998). "OBPRM: An Obstacle-Based PRM for 3D Workspaces". Robotics: The Algorithmic Perspective (Selected Contributions of WAFR 1998): 155–168.
  7. Guang Song & Nancy M. Amato (2004). "A Motion Planning Approach to Folding: From Paper Craft to Protein Foldin". IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation: 60–71.
  8. Lydia Tapia; Xinyu Tang; Shawna Thomas & Nancy M. Amato (2007). "Kinetics Analysis Methods For Approximate Folding Landscapes". Bioinformatics. 23 (13): 539–548. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm199. PMID 17646341.
  9. Jyh-Ming Lien & Nancy M. Amato (2006). "Approximate Convex Decomposition of Polygons". Computational Geometry. 35 (1–2): 100–123. doi:10.1016/j.comgeo.2005.10.005.
  10. Gabriel Tanase, Antal Buss, Adam Fidel, Harshvardhan, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Olga Pearce, Timmie Smith, Nathan Thomas, Xiabing Xu, Nedhal Mourad, Jeremy Vu, Mauro Bianco, Nancy M. Amato, and Lawrence Rauchwerger (2011). "The STAPL Parallel Container Framework". In Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN Symposium of Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP): 235–246.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  11. "Elected AAAI Fellows". www.aaai.org.
  12. Association for Computing Machinery. "ACM Fellows Named for Computing Innovations that Are Advancing Technology in the Digital Age". ACM. Archived from the original on 2015-12-09. Retrieved 2015-12-08.
  13. Institute of Electronics and Electrical Engineering (2010). "Fellow Class of 2010". Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering. Archived from the original on 2013-05-16. Retrieved 2013-04-28.
  14. Computing Research Association. "A. Nico Habermann Award". CRA. Retrieved 2014-02-28.
  15. American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (2013-11-25). "AAAS Council Elects 388 New AAAS Fellows". AAS. Retrieved 2014-02-28.
  16. IEEE Education Society. "Hewlett-Packard/Harriett B. Rigas Award". IEEE. Retrieved 2014-02-28.
  17. Association for Computing Machinery (2012-12-18). "ACM Recognizes Distinguished Members for Computing Advances that Sustain Competitiveness - 2012 Recipients Embody the Rewards of Participation in the Computing Community". ACM. Archived from the original on 2014-03-04. Retrieved 2014-02-28.
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