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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
[email protected] Prof. Jianer Chen:
http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/chen
[email protected] Prof. Jennifer Welch:
http://faculty.cs.tamu.edu/welch
