Chinwe Ekenna, The State University of New York

Abstract

Techniques for motion planning have advanced to address high-dimensional and complex environments. Understanding the approximations utilized in generating various robot configurations, as well as how much sampling is required to ensure that a path is constructed if one exists, is still a challenge. My talk will highlight advances in the topological representation of planning spaces for robots, as well as topological tools I developed to help explore, measure, and provide an upper-bound on the amount of sampling required in a given environment. This method is used to study protein-protein interactions in computational biology. The identification of biomolecular structures, functions, and interactions is aided by geometric properties of protein surfaces. These characteristics have proven to be significant in predicting protein-ligand or protein-protein interactions. I'll show how to extract significant geometric information from the protein surface using an algorithm that uses simplicial complexes and discrete Morse theory. We offer the probable intermediate conformations of the biomolecule around the protein surface as it travels to the binding site using the retrieved geometric information.

Bio:
Chinwe Ekenna is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University at Albany, State University of New York who got her PhD from Texas A&M University with Dr. Nancy Amato as her advisor.  Chinwe’s research centers on intelligent motion planning applied to robotics and proteins. She has explored intelligent adaptation of robotic motion planning to improve planning time and topological data analysis methods to capture important features of robot planning spaces. Her research interest includes Machine learning, computational geometry, and computational biology. Chinwe is a recipient of the NSF-CRII award on “Topology aware configuration spaces” and has gone on to publish several works in ICRA and IROS on this subject.  She is currently an Associate Editor for IEEE-RAL and has served on several program committees for the ICRA, IROS and WAFR conferences.  She is a committee member of the IEEE RAS Committee to Explore Synergies in Automation and Robotics (CESAR), which comprises top researchers in the field of automation and robotics.

Presented Via Zoom: https://rutgers.zoom.us/j/99468319917

Meeting ID: 994 6831 9917

Password: 886403