Kavraki receives Hopper Award

Kavraki
receives Hopper Award
…………………………………………………………………

Lydia Kavraki,
assistant professor of computer science, has been named
the 2000 recipient of the Association of Computing Machinery
(ACM) Grace Murray Hopper Award for her work on probabilistic
path planning. The Hopper Award is presented to the outstanding
young computer professional of the year, as identified by
the ACM.

Kavraki was honored
at the ACM awards banquet March 11 in San Jose, Calif.

The award is
presented on the basis of a single recent major technical
or service contribution. In Kavraki’s case, the award
recognizes her “seminal work in the probabilistic road-map
approach that has caused a paradigm shift in the area of
path planning and has many applications in robotics, manufacturing,
nanotechnology and computational biology.”

The award goes
to researchers 35 years old or younger at the time the contribution
was made.

In her doctoral
dissertation at Stanford University, Kavraki created randomized
path-planning algorithms for robots that had many degrees
of freedom, or several modes in which the system could continuously
move in space. Kavraki established the effectiveness of
methods that combine randomization with local, problem-specific
techniques for problems that could not be handled any other
way. Her approach now is considered the method of choice
and is called the probabilistic road-map approach. Examples
of robot tasks that can take advantage of probabilistic
road-map planning include maintenance of cooling pipes in
a nuclear plant, point-to-point welding in car assembly
and cleaning of airplane fuselages.

Kavraki’s
current research has expanded to include the application
of path-planning to bioinformatics, protein dynamics and
drug design.

The ACM recognized
Kavraki’s contributions for their breadth and depth
and for her work’s “level of originality, rigor
and elegance that stands out in the research community.”

Kavraki leads
the Physical Computing Group in the Department of Computer
Science. She holds a joint appointment in the Department
of Bioengineering and is affiliated with the Keck Center
for Computational Biology and the Computer and Information
Technology Institute (CITI). She received a National Science
Foundation Career Award in 1997 and a Sloan Fellowship in
2000.

Previous winners
of the Hopper Award include Bob Metcalfe, inventor of the
Ethernet and founder of 3Com Corp.; Bill Joy, principal
designer of the Berkeley UNIX system and chief scientist
and corporate executive officer for Sun Microsystems; and
Danny Hillis, pioneer of the concept of massively parallel
computers, vice president of research and development at
the Walt Disney Co. and co-founder and chief scientist of
Thinking Machines Corp.