Keerthana Nallamotu

Year in School
Junior

Major
Computer Science

Research Interests
Artificial Intelligence Bioinformatics and Computational Biology Data and Information Systems

Research Mentor
Prof. Nancy M. Amato

Research/Engagement Experience
For the last few years, I have been working under Dr. Nancy Amato in UIUC's Parasol Lab to explore the applications of motion planning algorithms in improving robot navigation and analyzing protein binding accessibility and contribute to the Parasol Planning Library open source project. I have also worked as an undergraduate researcher for Dr. Inki Kim's FlightPath/NeuroDNA project where I focused on designing, implementing, and validating a deep learning pipeline for identifying the concussion severity of a patient.

Interests
Outside of classes, I am currently working as a Vice President at Zero2One, an entrepreneurship RSO that runs an incubator on campus for early-stage student founders to build up a successful startup from scratch.

Project Title
Studying Accessibility with Skeleton-Guided Motion Planning

How did I get interested in Computer Science?
The aspect of CS that motivates me the most is the opportunity it provides to bridge the gap between concepts I learn in class and common issues I see in the community around me. Building my own projects that addressed such problems throughout high school made me feel empowered to make a change with the help of CS tools I had acquired. This passion continues to motivate me as I explore research opportunities that are geared towards tackling prevalent challenges in the real world.

What social interests matter to me?
Lack of access to education and employment for women

What is my most impactful college experience?
Meeting many new students and getting exposure to the large variety of RSOs on campus during orientation week encouraged me to reach out of my comfort zone and explore organizations beyond those I previously had experience with. Joining UIUC NeuroTech, for instance, in my first semester despite not having much background in computational neuroscience exposed me to an entirely new and exciting subfield of CS that I hope to continue exploring through both the RSO and my own research.

These are a few of my favorite things!
Outside of CS, I love playing badminton, painting, listening to music, and baking!

Research Description
At Professor Nancy Amato's Parasol Lab, my project is in the intersection of the realms of protein binding accessibility and motion planning research. In the past, we have had successes with hierarchical planning using an annotated skeleton for guidance through HAS-PRM to model the path of an enzyme into a protein's binding site. My goal this semester is to use the HAS-RRT algorithm we developed last year within the context of protein-ligand binding to create more accurate models from fewer but more meaningful samples.

Biography
Keerthana Nallamotu is a junior majoring in Computer Science interested in the intersection of artificial intelligence and medicine. She began her exploration of AI with an independent project focused on the use of machine learning to improve the diagnosis and treatment of speech disfluency, earning her recognition as a National Winner in the Conrad Challenge and a State Winner in Samsung's Solve for Tomorrow contest. Building upon this curiosity, she next began researching how artificial intelligence could be used to assist clinicians in more accurately identifying symptoms of Major Depression Disorder. Through these projects, she has gained experience in working with various subfields of machine learning such as Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing. Over the past few years, she also worked at UIUC's Parasol Labs to explore applications of motion planning models to protein binding accessibility. In the future, she hopes to build upon this background to tackle major challenges that are currently facing the medical field.