Heni Ben Amor

Heni Ben Amor joined Technische Universitaet Darmstadt (translates roughly as Darmstadt University of Technology) as a postdoctoral fellow in October, 2011. Before moving to TU Darmstadt, Heni was a full-time research associate at the Technical University Freiberg working on several projects funded by the DFG. In Freiberg he completed a Ph.D. in computer science ("summa cum laude") with a dissertation entitled "Imitation Learning of Motor Skills for Synthetic Humanoids". His Ph.D. research was conducted under the supervision of Prof. Bernhard Jung and Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro (University of Osaka, Japan) and received the Bernhard-v.-Cotta Dissertation Prize in 2011. Recently, he was also elected as fellow of the Daimler-Benz Foundation.

In 2005, Heni received a "Diplom-Informatiker" (German M.Sc.) degree from the University of Koblenz-Landau where he studied Computational Visualistics. At the Univ. of Koblenz-Landau, he was a member of the AI research group lead by Prof. Ulrich Furbach and was actively involved in the RoboCup research community. His Master's thesis had the title "Intelligent Exploration for Genetic Algorithms".

In 2005, funded by an InWent-Scholarship, Heni was a visiting scholar at the Intelligent Robotics Lab of the University of Osaka, Japan. Under the supervision of Prof. Hiroshi Ishiguro and with colleagues such as Shuhei Ikemoto and Takashi Minato, he worked on motion control algorithms for android robots. Since then, Heni concentrates on robot learning algorithms for solving difficult motor skill problems. In particular, he investigates imitation- and interaction learning methods that allow robots to acquire complex behaviors.

Heni's work on inverse steering behaviors has been used in several commercial applications such as video games or the Pathfinder Emergency Egress Simulator. He is also one of the main developers of the Kinect 3D scanning library called Scivi.

Heni Ben Amor can be found on [Google Citations] and [DBLP].

I am organizing this year's Workshop "Beyond Robot Grasping: Modern Approaches for Dynamic Manipulation" at the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2012). Take a look at the workshop website and submit a paper. :)

Research Interests: Imitation Learning of Motor Skills, Physical Human-Robot Interaction, Grasp Recognition and Synthesis, Robot Locomotion, Machine Learning, Simulations of Robots and Virtual Humans, Motion Capture
Biographical Information: Please see his curriculum vitae.
Publications: For the complete list of his publication, see here.

Key References

  1. S. Ikemoto, H. Ben Amor, T. Minato, H. Ishiguro, B. Jung (2012). Mutual Learning and Adaptation in Physical Human-Robot Interaction, IEEE Robotics and Automation, IEEE  download [PDF]
  2. H. Ben Amor, G. Heumer, B. Jung, A. Vitzthum (2008). Grasp Synthesis from Low-Dimensional Probabilistic Grasp Models, Journal of Computer Animation and Virtual Worlds, 19, Wiley Press
  3. G. Heumer, H. Ben Amor, B. Jung (2008). Grasp Recognition for Uncalibrated Data Gloves - A Machine Learning Approach, Presence, 17, MIT Press
  4. H. Ben Amor, J. Murray, O. Obst (2006). Fast, neat, and under control: Arbitrating between steering behaviors, in: Steve Rabin (eds.), AI Game Programming Wisdom 3, 3, Charles River Media

Contact Information

Mail: Dr. Heni Ben Amor, TU Darmstadt, FB Informatik, FG IAS, Hochschulstr. 10, 64289 Darmstadt
Office: Room E327, Robert-Piloty Gebaeude S2|02
work +49-6151-16-6167

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