Jean-Claude Latombe

Kumagai Professor Emeritus, School of Engineering, Computer Science Department

Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-9010

Email: latombe@cs.stanford.edu

Research Affiliation: Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, BioX

Office: Room 135, Gates Building

Phone: (650) 723-0350 Fax: (650) 725-1449

Administrative contact:
Alex Sandra Pinedo
146, Gates Building 1A
Email: asandra@cs.stanford.edu, Phone: (650) 721-6625

Administrative contact for KAUST only:
Yolanda Wise, KAUST AEA Program Administrator
Room 283, Gates Building 2B
Email: wise@cs.stanford.edu, Phone: (650) 723-4137

Research Interests: Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Motion Planning, Computational Structural Biology, Graphic Animation

The goal of my research is to create autonomous agents that sense, plan, and act in real and/or virtual worlds. My work focuses on designing architectures and algorithms to represent, sense, plan, control, and render motions of physical objects. A key underlying issue is to efficiently capture the connectivity of configuration or state spaces that are both high-dimensional and geometrically complex. Specific topics include: motion planning in the presence of multiple constraints (obstacle avoidance, maintenance of equilibrium, as well as kino-dynamic, visibility, and contact constraints), assembly sequence planning, making decisions under sensing and control uncertainty, construction of 3-D geometric models of complex environments, visual tracking of rigid, articulated and deforming objects, and reasoning in multiple-agent worlds. Applications include: robot-assisted medical surgery, integration of design and manufacturing, graphic animation of digital actors, study of molecular motions (folding, binding). My current projects study legged robots navigating on steep terrain, sensing and manipulation of deformable objects, structure and motion of proteins, and surgical simulation.

• Biographical
• Publications
• Research Projects (old)
• Group Members (current and former)
• CS121 (Introduction to Artificial Intelligence)
• CS273 (Algorithms for Structure and Motion in Biology)
• CS326A (Motion Planning)
• CS99k (Digital Actors)
• CS26N (Motion Planning for Robots, Digital Actors, and Other Moving Objects)
• Mountaineering

I spent Fall’2004 and Fall’2006 on sabbatical as the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Visiting Professor in the Computer Science Department at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple (shown below) was built in 1884. It is devoted to the deity Kuan Yin, the Chinese Goddess of Mercy, believed to be a manifestation of the Boddhisattva Avalokitesvara. The temple is located on Waterloo Street, near the Sri Krishnan Temple, the Malabar Muslim Jama-Ath Mosque, the Church of St. Peter and Paul and the Maghain Aboth Synagogue.

Si Tu punis le mal que j’ai fait par le mal,
Quelle est la différence entre Toi et moi, dis?

Omar Khayyam (Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer – 1048-1131)