Rice’s Lydia Kavraki wins ACM Athena Lecturer Award

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David Ruth713-348-6327david@rice.edu
Jade Boyd713-348-6778jadeboyd@rice.edu
Rice’s Lydia Kavraki wins ACM Athena Lecturer Award
Computer scientist recognized for groundbreaking research on robotics, biomedicine
HOUSTON — (April 26, 2017) — Rice University computer scientist Lydia Kavraki has received one of the most prestigious honors in her field, the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) Athena Lecturer Award.
Kavraki, the Noah Harding Professor of Computer Science and professor of bioengineering, was recognized for inventing randomized motion-planning algorithms in robotics and for the development of robotics-inspired methods for bioinformatics and biomedicine.
Lydia Kavraki (Photo by Doni Soward/Rice University)
“I am deeply honored by this award,” said Kavraki, who joined Rice’s faculty in 1996. “It recognizes years of work done with my students and collaborators at Rice and around the globe. I am also delighted that ACM has chosen to name one of its top awards after Athena, the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greek mythology, who was a patron of human ingenuity and an astute adviser of heroes. It strikes a chord with me, as her picture was on the cover of my textbooks when I was growing up in Greece.”
Given annually since 2006, the Athena Lecturer Award celebrates women researchers who have made fundamental contributions to computer science. The award carries a cash prize of $25,000 and the honoree is invited to give a lecture at a major ACM conference of her choice that will be recorded for the association’s website.
“Planning the motion of objects in a three-dimensional space has been a central challenge in the robotics field for a long time,” said ACM President Vicki Hanson. “Lydia Kavraki’s Probabilistic Roadmap Method (PRM) has had a tremendous impact. It is now widely used in robotics applications in industry and is a foundational idea for numerous researchers in the field.”
Though the award recognizes Kavraki’ ...

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