Aakriti Upadhyay

Aakriti Upadhyay

Postdoctoral Fellow

About Me

I am currently working as a Postdoctoral Fellow at Colorado School of Mines under Dr. Neil Dantam.

I graduated with a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University at Albany, SUNY. My research integrates concepts from Computational Geometry, Applied Mathematics, and Machine Learning. My work focuses on the robot motion planning problem and utilizes Topological Data Analysis (TDA) methods to optimize motion planning by leveraging environmental properties. The developed topology approach also extends its applications to computational biology problems, particularly in identifying optimal binding positions for protein-ligand or protein-protein interactions.


Peer Reviewed Publications

Near-Optimal Motion Planning Algorithms Via A Topological and Geometric Perspective

Upadhyay, A. K. (2023). Near-Optimal Motion Planning Algorithms via a Topological and Geometric Perspective (Doctoral dissertation, State University of New York at Albany).

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A New Tool to Study the Binding Behavior of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

Upadhyay, Aakriti and Chinwe Ekenna. "A New Tool to Study the Binding Behavior of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins." International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IJMS), MDPI, 2023.

Minimal Path Violation Problem with Application to Fault Tolerant Motion Planning of Manipulators.

Upadhyay, Aakriti, Mukulika Ghosh, and Chinwe Ekenna. "Minimal Path Violation Problem with Application to Fault Tolerant Motion Planning of Manipulators." 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2023.

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A geometric and topological analysis of the binding behavior of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

Upadhyay, Aakriti and Chinwe Ekenna. "A geometric and topological analysis of the binding behavior of Intrinsically Disordered Proteins" 2022 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM). IEEE, 2022.

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Incremental Path Planning Algorithm via Topological Mapping with Metric Gluing

Upadhyay, Aakriti, Boris Goldfarb, and Chinwe Ekenna. "Incremental Path Planning Algorithm via Topological Mapping with Metric Gluing." 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2022.

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A topology approach towards modeling activities and properties on a biomolecular surface

Upadhyay, Aakriti, Tuan Tran, and Chinwe Ekenna. "A topology approach towards modeling activities and properties on a biomolecular surface." 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM). IEEE, 2021.

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A Topological Approach to Finding Coarsely Diverse Paths

Upadhyay, Aakriti, Boris Goldfarb, and Chinwe Ekenna. "A Topological Approach to Finding Coarsely Diverse Paths." 2021 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2021.

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A New Application of Discrete Morse Theory to Optimizing Safe Motion Planning Paths

Upadhyay, Aakriti, Boris Goldfarb, Weifu Wang, and Chinwe Ekenna. "A new application of discrete morse theory to optimizing safe motion planning paths." In Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics XV: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, pp. 18-35. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022.

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Approximating Cfree space topology by constructing Vietoris-Rips complex

Upadhyay, Aakriti, Weifu Wang, and Chinwe Ekenna. "Approximating Cfree space topology by constructing Vietoris-Rips complex." 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2019.

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Rapidly Exploring Random Search Explorer (RESE)

Upadhyay, Aakriti, and Chinwe Ekenna. "Rapidly Exploring Random Search Explorer." In proceeding 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) workshop on Machine Learning in Robot Motion Planning (MLMP), October 2018.

Heterogeneous Planning Spaces (HPS)

Upadhyay, Aakriti, and Chinwe Ekenna. "Investigating heterogeneous planning spaces." In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR), pp.108-115. IEEE, 2018.

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User Profiling from Profile Picture (UP3)

Vasanthakumar, G. U., Aakriti Kumari Upadhyay, Pradeep F. Kalmath, Sthita Dinakar, P. Deepa Shenoy, and K.R. Venugopal. "UP3: User profiling from Profile Picture in Multi-Social Networking." In 2015 Annual IEEE India Conference (INDICON), pp. 1-6. IEEE, 2015.

Work Experience

Teaching Assistant (TA) - Department of Computer Science, CEAS, University at Albany, SUNY (August 2018 - May 2020, August 2021 - May 2022, Jan - May 2023)

I have assisted in teaching and grading work for graduate and undergraduate-level courses. I have handled courses like Discrete Mathematics, Algorithms and Data Structures, Finite Automata, and Principles of Programming Languages.

Research Assistant (RA) - Department of Computer Science, CEAS, University at Albany, SUNY (2020-2022)

I have worked in the RACS (Robotics Algorithms and Computable Systems) research lab and my duties involved research work-related activities like grant proposal writing, paper submissions to conferences and journals, research work presentations, and peer-reviewing of scientific papers. I also assisted undergraduate students with their capstone projects.

Technology Intern - Living Resources Company (May-August 2020)

I worked as a technology intern for the Misty project team. The project aims to bring a home assistant robot to help in serving people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. My responsibilities included:

  • Development of skills for the Misty robot which included emotion detection skills, speech analysis and auto-conversation skills, battery and routine monitoring skills, and autonomous driving skills.
  • Attendance to discussion meetings to gather technical information on Misty’s skills inventory from Misty Robotics (the manufacturer) and to understand the vision for the development plan.
  • Maintenance of project development plan document based on the continual matching of Misty’s onboard skills for a personal assistant robot.

Programming languages: JavaScript and REST API.

Software: Google Dialogflow and GitHub/GitLab.

Summer Research Intern - Oak Ridge National Laboratory (June - August 2019)

I worked as a summer research intern in the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics Division (CSMD) at ORNL for the Discrete Computing Sciences (DCS) group. My responsibilities included:

  • Development of a graph visualization algorithm that determines the difference between two time-series graphs over a time period.
  • Work on combinatorial integer optimization to solve sparse matrix multiplication problem on Nvidia CUDA.
  • Application of NLP (Natural Language Processing) technique to perform the semantic mapping between two cyber-physical documents.

Programming languages: Python, CUDA C/C++ and PyCUDA.

Student Assistant - Department of Computer Science, CEAS, University at Albany, SUNY (2017 - 2018)

I worked for the RACS research lab. My work involved:

  • Writing a literature review for the past and recent works done in the field of robot motion planning.
  • Designing and developing new algorithms integrating machine learning techniques.
  • Technologies used - C++, XML, Unix/Shell.

Web Developer Intern - ACASE (December 2017 - May 2018)

Developed an online application on the WordPress platform for teachers to help improve evaluation and assessment skills at high school level education. My responsibilities included:

  • Development and management of FORUM site for the organization.
  • Development of IDE (Internship Demonstrative Event) page for the ACASE website.
  • Involvement in publicizing activities for the book 'Knowing The Learner'.

Software Engineer - NetCracker Technology (2015 - 2016)

I have worked as a back-end developer for NetCracker's Product Development and Integration team. My responsibilities included:

  • Product development for NetCracker’s Integration and Mediation Interface used in customer services.
  • Designing of applications using Java, JavaScript, PL/SQL, Regex, XML, REST/SOAP User Interfaces with NetCracker’s well-structured database, allowing service providers to improve end-user relationships by consolidating real-time customer data into a user-friendly ecosystem that is accessible across all customer touch points.
  • Major responsibilities included developing customer products using the CI/CD processes, working with Issue Tracking systems (JIRA), working with the development and maintenance of applications, working with cross-cultural teams, and conducting knowledge transfer mentor sessions for incoming project members.

Intern - NetCracker Technology (12 February – 7 March 2015)

Developed a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) project that provides online telecommunication customer services for landline and mobile connections. My individual role involved the development of an order management module.

  • Programming languages - Java, JSP, and SQL.
  • The project was developed using Hibernate, Struts 2.0, DAO classes, and Apache Tomcat server.

Academic Projects

Employee management system with Permission Grid

The Project developed a role-based access control system that uses an approach to restrict access to the organization's directories to authorized users only. The project has been developed using Agile methodologies, and JAVA (Servlets), JSP, and MySQL technologies.

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Fake News Detection

The software was developed using Python to build a Support Vector Machine (SVM) for the classification of fake news from Twitter.

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Identify drug target for the Plasmodium falciparum parasite

Developed SVM (Support Vector Machine) on MATLAB, to classify drug targets in the metabolic networks. The project aims at reducing the effect of Plasmodium falciparum (malaria) parasite by identifying the target enzyme.

Round Robin Scheduling Algorithm with Dynamic Time Quantum

The objective was to improve the working of the round-robin scheduling algorithm. The project was developed on the Linux platform using C++ and Unix technologies.

Facial Object Extraction Using Robust Feature Detector

Objective was to detect the accurate facial features of human faces on improving the Viola-Jones algorithm in MATLAB. The project used known facial features to identify similar-looking individuals on the social media platform.