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DF seminar: AI meets Robotics – Robots that Reason about Human Activities

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Mar 23

Date and time: 23 March 2021, 3 pm – 4 pm
Speaker: Dr Karinne Ramirez-Amaro, Chalmers University of Technology
Title: AI meets Robotics – Robots that Reason about Human Activities

Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Meeting ID: 695 6088 7455
Password: 755440

Watch the recorded presentation:

 

Picture of Karinne Ramirez AmaroAbstract: Autonomous robots are expected to learn new skills and to re-use past experiences in different situations as efficient, intuitive and reliable as possible. Robots need to adapt to different sources of information, for example, videos, robot sensors, virtual reality, etc. Then, to advance the research in the understanding of human activities, in robotics, the development of learning methods that adapt to different sensors are needed.

In this talk, Dr amaro will introduce a novel learning method that generates compact and general semantic models to infer human activities. This learning method allows robots to obtain and determine a higher-level understanding of a demonstrator’s behaviour via semantic representations. First, the low-level information is extracted from the sensory data, then a meaningful semantic description, the high-level, is obtained by reasoning about the intended human behaviours. The introduced method has been assessed on different robots, e.g. the iCub, REEM-C, PR2, and TOMM, with different kinematic chains and dynamics. Furthermore, the robots use different perceptual modalities, under different constraints and in several scenarios ranging from making a sandwich to driving a car assessed on different domains (home-service and industrial scenarios). One important aspect of this approach is its scalability and adaptability toward new activities, which can be learned on-demand. Overall, the presented compact and flexible solutions are suitable to tackle complex and challenging problems for autonomous robots.

Biography: Dr Karinne Ramirez Amaro is an Assistant professor at Chalmers University of Technology since September 2019. Previously, she was a post-doctoral researcher at the Chair for Cognitive Systems (ICS) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She completed her PhD (summa cum laude) at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany in 2015. She received a Master degree in Computer Science (with honours) at the Center for Computing Research of the National Polytechnic Institute (CIC-IPN) in Mexico City, Mexico in 2007.

Dr Ramirez-Amaro received the Laura Bassi award granted by TUM and the Bavarian government to conduct a one-year research project in December 2015. She was awarded the prize of excellent Doctoral degree for female engineering students, granted by the state of Bavaria, Germany in September 2015. In addition, she was granted a scholarship for a Ph. D. research by DAAD – CONACYT and she received the Google Anita Borg scholarship in 2011. She was involved in the EU FP7 project Factory-in-a-day and in the DFG-SFB project EASE. Her research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Semantic Representations, Assistive Robotics, Expert Systems, and Human Activity Recognition and Understanding.