Ramirez, Karinne

Research Interests

Karinne Ramirez-Amaro is a postdoctoral researcher and a Laura Bassi fellow at the Institute for Cognitive Systems. Karinne received her PhD degree the 4th May 2015 with summa cum laude, the highest grade granted by the Electrical Engineering and Information Technology department at the Technical University of Munich. Karinne performed her PhD under the supervision of Prof. Gordon Cheng and she has joined ICS in January 2013. Previously, from October 2009 until Dec 2012 she was a member of the Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS) group under the supervision of Prof. Michael Beetz. Karinne got her Master in Computer Science, with honors, at the Center for Computing Research of the National Polytechnic Institute (CIC-IPN) in Mexico City, Mexico (www.cic.ipn.mx).

More on: http://web.ics.ei.tum.de/~karinne/Ramirez/index.html

Research Projects

Collaborative Research Center 1320 funded by DFG: Everyday Activity Science and Engineering (EASE) is the study of the design, realization, and analysis of information processing models that enable robotic agents (and humans) to master complex human-scale manipulation tasks that are mundane and routine.In the subproject NEEM (Narrative-Enabled Episodic Memory) we investigate representation, management, reasoning, and usage. For this, we will develop an embodied knowledge acquisition, representation, and management framework. Furthermore, we will investigate a physically embodied query answering service for knowledge completion. This will boost information processing for robots by exploiting episodic memory systems. Then, this will allow the acquisition of commonsense and naive physics knowledge as a big data analytic problem. The project started in July 2017.

The project EU-funded project Factory-in-a-day aims at improving the competitiveness of European manufacturing SMEs by removing the primary obstacle for robot automation: installation time and installation cost. This project started in October 2013. My main task in Factory-in-a-day is in the development of techniques for natural demonstrations using human-robot-co-manipulation. In this regard, our semantic-based reasoning approach is able to integrate different input sensors, such as the joint encoders of a robot, skin sensors (tactile and proximity) and visual information from the cameras of the robot (first view perspective).

RoboCub@Home is the largest international annual competition for autonomous service robots and is part of the RoboCup initiative. Team leader of the first TUM team to compete. October 2016 - July 2017.

Laura Bassi Price with this award Technische Universität München (TUM) promotes women in science. The title of my research project is "Exploiting semantic representations to infer human activities from different input sources". Funded by the government of Bavaria and TUM, Germany from January 2016 - January 2017.

German-Korean Partnership Programme (GEnKO-DAAD): The name of the project was "Machine Learning for the Generation of Flexible Motion Trajectories for Robot Manipulators". Within the project, we studied the generation of motions for robot arms and manipulators that are most likely to be appropriate given a particular situation and real-world task constraints, and we consequently apply these motions to control humanoid robots. This project was performed during July 2011-April 2013.

DFG Cluster of Excellence Cognition for Technical Systems (CoTeSys):This project was financed under the German Excellence Initiative from 2006 until October 2014. CoTeSys investigated cognition for technical systems such as vehicles, robots, and factories. Technical systems that are cognitive will be much easier to interact and cooperate with, and will be more robust, flexible, and efficient. I was involved in the sub-project of "Cognitive Models of Everyday Manipulation Tasks". My work was meanly focused on obtaining models of human everyday activities like setting the table. These models describe the arm movement in common task such as the reaching movement.

IPN - SIP "Computational Modeling and Simulation of physical and biological systems". This project was founded from January to December 2008 by the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN), Mexico. The main goal of this project was to model and simulate thermodynamics systems, mechanical systems and biological systems using non-linear techniques. My contribution in this project was to analyze of the thermodynamics, mechanical and biological system through non-linear techniques such as: Lyapunov exponent, fractal dimension, Poincare maps, among others.

NEW release of our Cooking Data sets

We are happy to announce the our TUM cooking data sets have been released and they are publicly available here.

Awards

Best Scientific Poster Award for RoboCup@Home 2017. The team Alle@Home participated for the first time in the RoboCup@Home competition, at the RoboCup@Home Open Platform league. The team won the "Best Scientific Poster" of the whole RoboCup@Home leagues (with more than 30 teams across all leagues). For more information visit here.
Laura Bassi Award for one year research project as postdoctoral fellow, 2016 . With this award, Technische Universität München (TUM) promotes women in science. The title of my research project is "Exploiting semantic representations to infer human activities from different input sources". Laura Bassi was the first female scientist who was awarded with a professorship at an European university in 1776. The funding is provided by the government of Bavaria. For more information visit here.
Excellent Doctoral degree for female engineering students, 2015: This prize is given as a recognition to the outstanding final or doctoral thesis from Bavarian universities to female graduates in engineering. This prize is granted by the Bavarian Ministry for Science, Education, Arts and Cultural Affairs, Germany on September 2015. For more information visit http://www.km.bayern.de/pressemitteilung/9730/nr-349-vom-15-09-2015.html, also visit http://www.km.bayern.de/studenten/meldung/3758.html.
Dr. Kanako Miura Travel Grant: In recognition of Dr. Kanako Miura's contributions to Humanoid Robotics, the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Humanoid Robotics initiated the Miura Memorial award. The goal is to assist female PhD and MS students entering the field with travel to Humanoids 2013 in Atlanta. This year (2013), 6 people received the award (http://www.humanoids2013.com/support.html).
DFG Student Travel Support: Thanks for the generous support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), PhD and master students who are studying at German universities and research institutions are invited to apply for travel support to participate ICRA 2013. Only 20 students obtained this support out of 89 applications (http://www.icra2013.org/?page_id=771).
Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship: Europe, the Middle East and Africa 2011. In Anita Borg honor, Google support women in technology with the Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship. Google hopes to encourage women to excel in computing and technology and become active role models and leaders in the field (http://www.google.com/anitaborg/emea/winners.html).

Publications

2020

Watanabe, Yoshiaki, Amaro, Karinne Ramirez, Ilhan, Bahriye, Kinoshita, Taku, Bock, Thomas and Cheng, Gordon: Robust Localization with Architectural Floor Plans and Depth Camera. IEEE/SICE International Symposium on System Integration (SII), 2020, 133-138 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI )
Constantin Uhde, Nicolas Berberich, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, and Gordon Cheng: The Robot as Scientist: Using Mental Simulation to Test Causal Hypotheses Extracted from Human Activities in Virtual Reality. IROS, 2020 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)

2019

Cheng, Gordon and Ramirez-Amaro, Karinne and Beetz, Michael and Kuniyoshi, Yasuo: Purposive learning: Robot reasoning about the meanings of human activities. Science Robotics 4 (26), 2019 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI )
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Constantin Uhde, Tamas Bates, Gordon Cheng: A Benchmarking Dataset for Automatic Symbolic Grounding from Virtual Demonstrations. 2nd International Workshop on Computational Models of Affordance in Robotics at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2019 more… BibTeX
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Yezhou Yang, Gordon Cheng: A Survey on Semantic-based Methods for the Understanding of Human Movements. Robotics and Autonomous Systems 119, 2019, 117–122 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI )

2018

Emmanuel Dean, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Florian Bergner, Ilya Dianov, and Gordon Cheng: Integration of Advanced Robotic Technologies for Rapidly Deployable Industrial Robots. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics (4), 2018 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI ) Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro and Gordon Cheng: Accelerating the teaching of industrial robots by re-using semantic knowledge from various domains. Workshop WORKMATE: the WORKplace is better with intelligent, collaborative, robot MATEs at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. May 2018, Brisbane, Australia. , 2018 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)

2017

Emmanuel Dean-Leon, Brennand Pierce, Florian Bergner, Philipp Mittendorfer, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Wolfgang Burger and Gordon Cheng: TOMM: Tactile Omnidirectional Mobile Manipulator. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017Singapore, May 29 - June 3, 2017, 2441-2447 more… BibTeX
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Humera Noor Minhas, Michael Zehetleitner, Michael Beetz, and Gordon Cheng.: Added Value of Gaze-Exploiting Semantic Representation to Allow Robots Inferring Human Behaviors. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems, Vol. 7, No. 1, Article 5 7, 2017 more… BibTeX
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro,Michael Beetz, Gordon Cheng: Added Value of Gaze-Exploiting Semantic Representation to Allow Robots Inferring Human Behaviors. ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems (TiiS) 7 (1), 2017 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI )
Tamas Bates, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Tetsunari Inamura, Gordon Cheng: On-Line Simultaneous Learning and Recognition of Everyday Activities from Virtual Reality Performances. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2017)I, 2017 more… BibTeX

2016

E. Dean, K. Ramirez-Amaro, F. Bergner, I. Dianov, P. Lanillos, and G. Cheng: Robotic technologies for fast deployment of industrial robot systems. IEEE Industrial Electronics Conference (IEEE IECON2016), 2016 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Emmanuel Dean-Leon, Florian Bergner, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro and Gordon Cheng: From Multi-modal Tactile Signals to a Compliant Control. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots 2016, 2016 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Emmanuel Dean-Leon, Ilya Dianov, Florian Bergner and Gordon Cheng,: General Recognition Models Capable of Integrating Multiple Sensors for Different Domains. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots 2016, 2016 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
llya Dianov, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Pablo Lanillos, Emmanuel Dean-Leon, Florian Bergner and Gordon Cheng: Extracting general task structures to accelerate the learning of new tasks. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots 2016 , 2016 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)

2015

Ilya Dianov, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro and Gordon Cheng: Generating Compact Models for Traffic Scenarios to Estimate Driver Behavior Using Semantic Reasoning. IROS, International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 20157th International workshop on Planning, Perception and Navigation for Intelligent Vehicles, IROS, 69-74 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro , Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Understanding the intention of human activities through semantic perception: observation, understanding and execution on a humanoid robot. Advanced Robotics 29 (5), 2015, 345-362 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI ) Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro , Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Understanding the intention of human activities through semantic perception: observation, understanding and execution on a humanoid robot. Advanced Robotics 29 (5), 2015, 345-362 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI ) Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Emmanuel Dean-Leon, and Gordon Cheng: Robust Semantic Representations for Inferring Human Co-manipulation Activities even with Different Demonstration Styles. 15th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2015 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Michael Beetz, Gordon Cheng: Transferring Skills to Humanoid Robots by Extracting Semantic Representations from Observations of Human Activities. Artificial Intelligence Journal, 2015 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI ) Full text (mediaTUM)
Nicholas H. Kirk, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Emmanuel Dean-Leon, Matteo Saveriano and Gordon Cheng: Online Prediction of Activities with Structure: Exploiting Contextual Associations and Sequences. 15th IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2015 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Stefan Ehrlich, Agnieszka Wykowska, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Gordon Cheng: Predictive modeling of higher-cognitive processes involved in social engagement based on electroencephalography (EEG). Proceedings of the Bernstein Conference 2015 (Bernstein Conference 2015) , 2015Bernstein Conference 2015 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Wykowska, Agnieszka Kajopoulos, Jasmin Ramirez-Amaro, Karinne Cheng, Gordon: Autistic traits and sensitivity to human-like features of robot behavior. Interaction Studies Vol 16 (2), 2015, 219 -248 more… BibTeX Full text ( DOI )

2014

Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Ewald Lutscher, Andreas Holzbach, Gordon Cheng: iCub@ICS-TUM: Semantic Reasoning, Constrained Manipulation and Humanoid Vision enable on the iCub. ICRA 2014, 2014 more… BibTeX
Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Automatic Segmentation and Recognition of Human Activities from Observation based on Semantic Reasoning. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems , 2014 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Understanding Human Activities from Observation via Semantic Reasoning for Humanoid Robots. IROS Workshop on AI and Robotics, 2014IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2014), more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Tetsunari Inamura, Emmanuel Dean-Leon, Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Bootstrapping Humanoid Robot Skills by Extracting Semantic Representations of Human-like Activities from Virtual Reality. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2014 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Stefan Ehrlich, Agnieszka Wykowska, Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Gordon Cheng: When to engage in interaction - and how? EEG-based enhancement of robot’s ability to sense social signals in HRI. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2014 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)

2013

Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Eun-Sol Kim, Jiseob Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang, Michael Beetz, Gordon Cheng: Enhancing Human Action Recognition through Spatio-temporal Feature Learning and Semantic Rules. IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2013 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Eun-Sol Kim, Jiseob Kim, Byoung-Tak Zhang, Michael Beetz, Gordon Cheng: Enhancing Human Action Recognition through Spatio-temporal Feature Learning and Semantic Rules. Humanoid Robots, 2013, 13th IEEE-RAS International Conference, 2013 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Extracting Semantic Rules from Human Observations. 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 6-10, 2013, 2013 ICRA'13 workshop: Semantics, Identification and Control of Robot-Human-Environment Interaction more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Michael Beetz and Gordon Cheng: Extracting Semantic Rules from Human Observations. 2013 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 6-10, 2013, 2013 ICRA'13 workshop: Semantics, Identification and Control of Robot-Human-Environment Interaction more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)

2012

Eun-Sol Kim, Jiseob Kim, Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Michael Beetz, Byoung-Tak Zhang: Human Cooking Action Recognition via Spatio-temporal Feature Learning based on ISA. Journal special edition of the Korean Computer Conference (KCC12), 2012 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Eun-sol Kim, Jiseob Kim, Karinne Ramirez Amaro, Michael Beetz and Byoung-Tak Zhang: A Visual Hypernetwork Model using Eye-Gaze-Information-Based Active Sampling. Korean Computer Conference (KCC12), South Korea, 2012, 2012 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)
Karinne Ramirez Amaro and J.C. Chimal-Eguia: Image-Based Learning Approach Applied to Time Series Forecasting. Journal of Applied Research and Technology. Vol. 10 No. 3, June 2012 Vol. 10 No. 3 (Vol. 10 no. 3), 2012 more… BibTeX Full text (mediaTUM)