About Me
I am Julie (Yulie) Arad, a rising senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I plan on graduating May 2024 with a dual degree in Computer Science and Mathematics. My main research interest areas are Motion Planning, Computational Complexity, and Quantum Computing. I have been working with the Parasol Lab at the University of Illinois since Spring 2023, under the leadership and guidance of Professor Nancy M. Amato and Ph.D. student, Stav Ashur.
Email: arad2@illinois.edu
About My Mentor
Professor Nancy M. Amato is Head of the Computer Science Department and Abel Bliss Professor of Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests are in motion planning, robotics, computational geometry, computational biology, parallel and distributed computing, parallel algorithms, artificial intelligence, CAD, VR, animation, performence modeling and optimization. She is co-director of the Parasol Lab and has a myriad of other accomplishments, including being Co-Director of the CRA-WP Distributed REU (DREU) program since 2000, CRA Board Chair (2021-2023), and AAAS Section T-Chair (2021-2022).
About My Project
I am working on a motion planning research project. This project focuses on fast exploration, in which we first sample a point, check its validity (either free or obstacle space) and then proceed to expand a ball around the point, until we find a point of the opposite validity. Once we repeat this process some number of times, we have a roadmap of balls of both free and obstacle space that we can use to traverse through the space. We are exploring different methods of connecting points within the roadmap, variations of expansion methods, and different types of queries that we can use to determine the number of samples we need to take.