NANCY M. AMATO

Unocal Professor and OSIS Director

Email: amato@cse.tamu.edu
Phone: 979/862-2275
Office: HRBB 425H
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, parallel and distributed computing, parallel algorithms, performance modeling and optimization.

SELECTED RESEARCH SUPPORT

"RI: Small: Scalable Roadmap-Based Methods for Simulating and Controlling Behaviors of Interacting Groups: from Robot Swarms to Crowd Control" (IIS-0917266), The National Science Foundation, 9/2009-8/2012.

"DC: Small: Collaborative Research: Shape Representation of Large Geometries via Convex Approximation" (IIS-096053), The National Science Foundation, 9/2009-8/2012.

"A Compositional Approach to Scalable Parallel Software" (CCF-0833199), The National Science Foundation (HECURA Program), The National Science Foundation, 9/2008-8/2012.

"Motion Planning Based Techniques for Modeling & Simulating Molecular Motions" (CCF-0830753), The National Science Foundation, 9/2008-8/2012.

AWARDS

Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching, Texas A&M University, 2011

E.D. Brockett Professorship Award, 2009-2010

TEES Senior Fellow Award, College of Engineering, Texas A&M University, 2009-2010

Fellow, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), 2010

ACM Distinguished Speaker, 2008 - present

Woman's Progress Award, Texas A&M University, 2008

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 Women's 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

Unocal Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, 9/2011-present

Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University, 9/2004-2011

Deputy Director, Inst. for Applied Mathematics and Computational Science (IAMCS), 6/2010-present

Chair, Alliance for Bioinformatics, Computational Biology & Systems Biology (ABCS), 8/2007-present

Director, OSIS (information system), Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, 3/2006-present

Past Chair, 9/2010-8/2011; Chair 8/2009-8/2010); Council of Principal Investigators (CPI)

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

Editorial Board Member, Theory of Computing Systems (TCS), 2009-present.

Editorial Board Member, Journal of Computational Geometry (http://jocg.org/), 2009-present.

Associate Editor, International Journal of Computational Geometry and Applications (IJCGA), 2008-present.

Editor, IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Conference Editorial Board (CEB), 2006-2010.

Editor, Journal of Information Science and Engineering, 2005-2011.

Associate Editor, IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Computing, 2002-2005.

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

Review Board Member, Center for Graduate Education Initiative, JAIST (Japan Advanced Institute of Sci. and Tech.), Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan, 2010-present.

External Evaluator, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College, Dublin, May 2008.

Swedish Research Foundation, Panelist. Computer science research proposals (08/09). Science Foundation Ireland, Panelist. Computer science research proposals (10/05, 2/06, 10/07, 2/08, 3/09).

National Science Foundation (NSF), Advisory Committee Service. NSF Committee of Visitors (COV) for the Computing and Communication Foundations Division, CISE Directorate, March 2009, June 2006; 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.

National Institute of Health (NIH), Study Section Member. Special Study Section SSS-H (90) on Computational Biology (6/03, 11/03); Biodata Management and Analysis (BDMA,3/04, 6/04, 7/05); Biological Chemistry and Macromolecular Biophysics (BCMB-Q, 2/05); Special Emphasis Panel (2/09); Special Emphasis Panel (6/10).

National Science Foundation (NSF), Panelist. Robotics, Geometric Computing, Theory and Broadening Participation in Computing programs, Graduate Fellowships, Distinguished Teaching Awards, Site Visits (5/97, 12/97, 4/98, 1/00, 11/00, 6/02, 10/02, 2/04, 9/05, 10/05, 4/06, 11/06, 3/07, 5/08, 12/09).

Professional Societies and Other Major Service Activities

• Administrative Committee Member (elected), 2009-2011.
• Member, IEEE Fellows Evaluation Committee, RAS and Computer Society, 2010.
• Member, Steering Committee for Technical Programs (SCTP), 2009-2010.
• Member, Electronic Products and Services Board (EPSB), 2009-2010.

NCWIT Academic Alliance Co-Chair, 9/09-present. NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology, http://www.ncwit.org) is a coalition of more than 170 prominent corporations, academic institutions, government agencies, and non-profits working 3 to increase women's participation in information technology (IT). The NCWIT Academic Alliance (AA) consists of more than 90 institutions and is charged with implementing institutional change in higher education.

CDC Committee Member, Coalition to Diversity Computing (CDC), 9/08-present. The CDC is co-sponsored by the IEEE, the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), and the CRA (Computing Research Association), the three main professional societies in computing. Co-Director of the Distributed Research Experiences for Undergraduates (DREU) Project (DREU is jointly administered by the CDC and CRA-W, and was known as the DMP from 1994-2008), 9/08-present. See http://cdc-computing.org/ for program details.

CRA-W Committee Member, Computing Research Association (CRA) Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research (CRA-W), 9/00-present. Co-Director of the Distinguished Lecture Series (DLS) Project (DLS is jointly administered by the CDC and CRA-W), 8/08-present. Co-Director of the Distributed Research Experiences for Under- graduates (DREU) Project from 9/00-8/08 (DREU was known as the DMP, Distributed Mentor Project, from 1994-2008). See http://www.cra-w.org/ for program details.

Steering Committee Member, Intern. Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, 2009-present.

General Chair, ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (CF), Bertinoro, Italy, 2010.

Editor-in-Chief, Conference Editorial Board, IEEE/RSJ Intern. Conf. of Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2011.

Conference Co-Chair, WAFR 2006: Intern. Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR), New York City, NY, 2006.

Organizer, Invited Minisymposium on Computational Biology, SIAM Conference on Discrete Mathematics, Austin, TX, 2010.

Organizing Committee Member, SIAM Conf. on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP), San Francisco, CA, 2006.

Registration and Web Chair, Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques (PACT); Brasov, Romania, 2007; Galveston, TX, 2011.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: Program Committee Chair for Invited Talks, 2004; Member of Academic Advisory Committee, 2010, 2006; Scholarship Committee Co-Chair, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

Gabriel Tanase, Antal Buss, Adam Fidel, Harshvardhan, Ioannis Papadopoulos, Olga Pearce, Timmie G. Smith, Nathan L. Thomas, Xiabing Xu, Nedal Mourad, Jeremy Vu, Mauro Bianco, Nancy M. Amato and Lawrence Rauchwerger, "The STAPL Parallel Container Framework," in Proc. of ACM SIGPLAN Symposium on Principles and Practice of Parallel Programming (PPoPP), San Antonio, TX, pp. 235-246, 2011.

Samuel Rodriguez, Nancy M. Amato, "Behavior-Based Evacuation Planning," Proc. of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 350-355, Anchorage, Alaska, May 2010.

Xinyu Tang, Shawna Thomas, Philip Coleman, Nancy M. Amato, "Reachable Distance Space: Efficient Sampling-Based Planning for Spatially Constrained Systems," International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), special issue of selected papers from WAFR 2008, 29(7), June 2010, pp. 916-934. DOI: 10.1177/0278364909357643

Xinyu Tang, Shawna Thomas, Lydia Tapia, David P. Giedroc, Nancy M. Amato, "Simulating RNA Folding Kinetics on Approximated Energy Landscapes," Journal of Molecular Biology, 3811(4):1055-1067, Sep 2008.

Jyh-Ming Lien and Nancy M. Amato, "Approximate Convex Decomposition of Polyhedra and Its Applications," Computer Aided Geometric Design (CAGD), 25(7), October 2008, pp. 503-522. Preliminary version appeared in Proc. of the ACM Solid and Physical Modeling Symposium (SPM), pp. 121-131. (Back Cover Image), June 2007.