The Board of the Hellenic Artificial Intelligence Society (EETN) is very pleased to announce that our member, Professor Lydia E. Kavraki, has been honored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s (ACM) 2017-2018 with the prestigious Athena Lecturer Award. Professor Kavraki was cited for the invention of randomized motion-planning algorithms in robotics and the development of robotics-inspired methods for bioinformatics and biomedicine. She is an internationally recognized leader in developing physical algorithms, an area that addresses the computational challenges of objects moving in space while subject to physical constraints. She has made significant contributions to an impressively wide range of areas, ranging from how a robot might move through a course of obstacles, and how a drug molecule might change its shape to interact with a target protein; to her current work on planning the motions of Robonaut 2, NASA’s robotic assistant at the International Space Station.
Professor Kavraki will formally receive the Athena Lecturer Award at the ACM’s annual awards banquet on June 24, 2017 in San Francisco.

Congratulations Lydia! We are very lucky and honored to have you as part of our community