BIOGRAPHY

Karinne Ramirez-Amaro is an Associate Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden. She completed her Ph.D. (summa cum laude) at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Munich in 2015. She has received several awards, including the Price of an Excellent Doctoral degree for female engineering students and the Google Anita Borg Award. Her research interests include Interpretable and Explainable AI, Semantic Representations, Cause-based Learning Methods, Collaborative Robotics, and Human Activity Recognition and Understanding. She is one of the team leaders of the new Interpretable AI research theme at Chalmers. She has been an Associate Editor of various journals, such as IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and ELSEVIER Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS). In 2022, Karinne was elected as a member of the Administrative Committee (AdCom) from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society (RAS), and she was the chair of the IEEE RAS Women in Engineering (WiE) Committee. In 2023, she became an Associate Vice-President of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion for the RAS Member Activity Board..

IEEE and IEEE RAS ACTIVITIES

COMMITTEES & CONFERENCES:

2024 – Invited as IEEE-RAS Associate Vice President of the Members Activity Board for Diversity

Equity and Inclusion.

2024 – Co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion Committee for the IEEE-RAS ICRA 2024 (Japan).

2023 – Co-chair of the Diversity and Inclusion for the IEEE-RAS CASE 2023 (Auckland, New Zealand).

2023 – Co-chair of the Workshops and Tutorials committee for the IEEE-RAS IROS 2023 (Detroit, USA).

2023 – Chair of the student activities & K-12 outreach committee for the IEEE-RAS ICRA 2023 (London, UK).

2022 – Elected as member of the Administrative Comite (AdCom) from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.

2022-23 – Chair of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society of Women in Engineering (WiE). I was leading a team of around 25 people that includes professors, researchers and industrial people.

2021 – Member of the evaluation committee for the IEEE RAS Section Chapter of the Year Award.

2018 –2021 –  IEEE-RAS Associate Vice President of the Conference Operations Committee. This committee is part of the IEEE Conference Activities Board (CAB), USA.

2020 – Member of the organizer committee for the conference IEEE ICRA 2024 (JP).

2020 – Chair of the Special RAS Events as part of the ICRA 2020 virtual conference.

2019 – Member of the organizer committee for the conference IEEE ICRA 2023 (UK). I will be in charge of the student activities & K-12 outreach chair.

2019 – Co-chair of the RAS Conference Organizers Workshop at ICRA, Montreal, Canada.

2018 – Chair and organizer of the IEEE Women in Engineering (WIE) lunch during the CASE conference, Munich, Germany.

2018 – Co-chair the IEEE-IROS session “Legged Robots II”, Madrid, Spain.

2017 – Main organizer of 7 International Workshop as part of the IROS conference, e.g. “Semantic Policy and Action Representations for Autonomous Robots (SPAR)”, 150 participants. Canada, Spain, China & Czech Republic.

2016 – Main organizer of 4 International outreaching workshops, e.g. the symposium WeLead – Women Leaders in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics and Engineering, around 350 participants. Munich, Germany.

SOCIETY:

2024 – Speaker at the lunch event of the IEEE-RAS- Student Activities Committee (SAC) at ICRA

2024 – Yokohama, Japan.

2024 – Speaker at the event of the LatinX non-profit organization at ICRA 2024, Yokohama, Japan.

2024 – Panelist at the lunch event of the IEEE-RAS- Women in Engineering (WiE) at ICRA 2024.

2022–2021 – Co-organizer of six lunch events for Women in Engineering (WiE) at three main conferences: IEEE-RAS ICRA (22:Philadelphia, USA & 23:London, UK), CASE (22:Mexico city, Mexico & 23:Auckland, New Zealand) & IROS (22:Kyoto, Japan & 23:Detroit, USA).

2022 – Invited as a panel member to Machine Learning for Automation, IEEE-RAS CASE conference, Mexico.

2021 – Panelist at the RAS Town Hall, ICRA (Online).

2021 – Mentor and part of the IEEE RAS Young Reviewers Program.

2020 – Panelist to the IEEE RAS Women in Robotics Discussion, online.

2020 – Mentor at the IEEE Women in Engineering (WiE).

2019 – Panelist at the IEEE RAS Women in Engineering (WIE) luncheon, IEEE-IROS, Macao, China.

OTHER:

2020 – Associate Editor of the IEEE journal Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L).

2018 – Associate Editor of International Conferences such as ICRA, IROS, Humanoids, ECAI, SII.

2015 – Reviewer of more than 12 peer-reviewed journals, e.g. IEEE T-RO, RA-L, HMS, RAS, NeuNets, CEA, KI, JIST, IET, JVCI.

2012 – Reviewer of more than 35 international conferences, e.g. ICRA, IROS, Humanoids, AAAI, IJCAI, ECAI, CoRL, RO-MAN, ICAR, SII.

QUALIFICATIONS 

I have contributed to the IEEE-RAS for more than 16 years first as a reviewer and currently as an Associate Vice-President (A-VP) for MAB. During my time as A-VP, I have interacted with different conference organizers sponsored by RAS and I have understood the needs and struggles they faced during the last couple of years. Furthermore, I am an active member of the society since I participate as a speaker, reviewer, organizer, and attendee at the different conferences/journals sponsored by RAS. This gives me the opportunity to identify the needs of the society which I can communicate to the conference organizers and Editor-in-Chiefs to enhance the experience and expectations of the members. This acquired experience makes me an ideal candidate for this position despite my young career stage.

MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENTS

As part of my current role of A-VP Operations at the Conference Activity Board (CAB), my team and I have launched different initiatives that will benefit the future conference organizers, e.g:

1. We alunch the IDEA travel support which has increase the diversity of attendees of RAS members to different conferences: https://www.ieee-ras.org/women-in-engineering/idea-travel-support
2. We are building a new committee for Diversity Equity and Inclusion within the society. As part of this new committe we are helping underepresneted members to actively participate in RAS conferences.
3. We have launched the new RAS conference document library (https://www.ieee-ras.org/about-ras/volunteer-resources/ras-conference-leadership-portal). This new conference library contains information from more than 200 conferences that are (co-)sponsored by RAS. This information will help future organizers to improve their planning for hosting high-quality conferences.
4. We have archived more than 120 conference websites. This means that the information and details of the past conference will always be preserved on the IEEE-RAS site.
5. We provided support to the conferences affected by COVID-19 and we published some guidelines and best practices after collecting feedback from more than 91 conference organizers (https://www.ieee-ras.org/conferences-workshops/coronavirus-covid-19).
6. We collaborated with the Members Activity Board (MAB) to introduce, to the society, the newly established committee RAS-CARES (Committee to Aid Reporting on Misconduct concerns, https://www.ieee-ras.org/about-ras/diversity-page/ieee-ras-cares).

POSITION STATEMENT

Our Robotics and Automation Society (RAS) is evolving rapidly, and we need to enhance the services offered by the IEEE RAS to their members. This evolution represents a big challenge that can be addressed by increasing the diversification of the members of this society. If re-elected to the RAS administrative committee (AdCom), one of my major goals will be to continously foster younger and diverse members to be involved in important committees such as CAB, MAB, etc, as I have been trying during the last years. I believe that if we enhance the diversity of the different committees we can broaden the participation of new members. This will open up new opportunities that will allow for new ideas and initiatives that can greatly benefit our society, one clear example was the succesful initiative of the IDEA travel support. Furthermore, this will contribute to a transparent and fair decision-making process at the different levels of the society.