department of computer science texas a&m university jennifer l. welch

Department of Computer Science Texas A&M University

Jennifer L. Welch

Location of Texas A&M University

College Station, Texas

About College Station, Texas Population of area is approximately 133,550 90 miles northwest of Houston and 170

miles south of Dallas. Growing industrial base, excellent housing,

strong public school systems, many recreational and entertainment activities.

College Station is the home of the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

Texas A&M University Established in 1876 as

first public institution of higher education in Texas

More than 2,200 faculty members

About 45,000 students

Department of Computer Science

Degrees offered: Bachelor’s Master’s

– thesis– courses-only

PhD in Computer Science and, jointly with the Departmentof Electrical Engineering, in Computer Engineering.

CS Research Areas architecture artificial intelligence bioinformatics computational

mathematics computer systems

and networks computer vision distributed systems

hypertext / hypermedia neural networks real-time systems robotics software systems theoretical computer

science VLSI design

automation etc.

CS Research Facilities Research labs with state-of-the-art Sun, Hewlett-

Packard (including an HP 16-processor V class), and Intel workstations, connected to Gigabit Ethernet/ATM

Instructional network of more than 800 workstations/PCs and compute and file servers.

Specialized teaching labs for networking, computer architecture, microcomputer design, real-time systems, robotics, and senior engineering design.

Campus has IBM Regatta p690, SGI Origin 3000 and SGI Origin 2000; connected to Internet with OC-3.

CS Faculty and Students

Above: Prof. Amato’s research group, with Prof. Bjarne Stroustrup

Above: Profs. Chen, Klappenecker and Sarin at new grad student orientation

Left: Fall picnic

Nancy Amato’s Research•Research Group

• 12+ graduate students• 2-4 undergraduates during the academic year• usually 2-4 undergraduates for summer internships (not all from TAMU)

•Research Topics

• Motion Planning, Computational Biology, Robotics, Animation, VR• Parallel & Distributed Computing, C++ Libraries, Performance modeling• Computational Science (Chemistry, Geophysics, Neuroscience,

Physics)

• Undergraduate Research Projects• recent projects from all the above areas• usually work in small group with me, an advanced graduate student, and

possibly another undergraduate• many projects lead to publications in international conferences and

journals

Motion Planning

start

goal obstacles

(Basic) Motion Planning:

Given a movable object and a description of the environment, find a sequence of valid configurations that moves it from the start to the goal.

Example: The Alpha Puzzle

Objective: Separate the two tubes, one is the ‘robot’ the other is an ‘obstacle’

Soccer Ball: 31 dofPolyhedron: 25 dof

Hard Motion Planning Problems: Highly Articulated (Constrained) Systems

Digital Actors• Closed chain constraint

Paper Folding

Hard Motion Planning Problems:Group Behaviors for Multiple Robots

Traversing a Narrow Passage

Hard Motion Planning Problems Computational Biology & Chemistry

• Drug Design - molecule docking

• Protein Folding – find folding pathways

Jianer Chen’s Research Algorithms and optimization Computational complexity theory Parallel processing and Networking Computer Graphics

Research group: 2-3 undergraduate students 5 graduate students

Algorithms and Optimization(sample problems)

Algorithms for practical problems (task scheduling, network routing …)

Optimization and approximation of hard problems (vertex cover, SAT …)

Undergraduate student participation:algorithm development, implementation, and testing

Computational complexity(sample problems)

Study of computational intractability (NP-hardness, W[1]-completeness … )

Parameterized tractability and approximability

Undergraduate student participation:learning the frontier research, and prepare for graduate study and research

Parallel Processing and Networking (sample problems)

Network fault tolerance Network routing Network security

Undergraduate student participation:

development, implementation, and testing network algorithms

Computer Graphics

• Graphics shape modeling and solid modeling• Interactive graphics modeling systems• Graphics data structures

and algorithms

Undergraduate student participation: development, implementation, and testing of interactive graphics modeling systems

Jennifer Welch’s ResearchResearch Group

• 5 graduate students• 2 undergraduates• 1 post-doctoral fellow

Research Topics – Theory of Distributed Computing• Mobile Ad Hoc Networks• Metamorphic Robots• Randomized Distributed Data Structures

Undergraduate Research Projects• involve theory and/or implementation, as student wishes• closely integrated into research group• projects can lead to publications

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks MANET: links form and disappear as nodes

come into and go out of each other’s wireless communication range

Investigating design of fault-tolerant algorithms and services

Undergrad projects: algorithm development and simulation for clock synchronization, leader election, group communication.

Metamorphic Robots

How to get a collection of homogeneous interlocking robots to change their global shape

Undergrad project: algorithm develop-ment, correctness proof, and simulation for handling obstacles.

Distributed Data Structures Develop useful and rigorous specifications of

DDS’s with probabilistic behavior Find efficient algorithms to implement the

specifications Identify classes of distributed applications

that can tolerate probabilistic behavior

Undergrad projects: simulation of distributed linear algebra applications; simulations of algorithms to implement a shared stack.

Contact Info

Prof. Nancy Amato:http://parasol.tamu.edu/~amato

amato@cs.tamu.edu Prof. Jianer Chen:

http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/chen

chen@cs.tamu.edu Prof. Jennifer Welch:

http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/welch

welch@cs.tamu.edu