You can find my full CV here.
I was born in Braila, Romania and got my B.Sc. in Computer Science from Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, after which I went to Carnegie Mellon for my PhD in Robotics. I am now an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. Highlights of my activities and awards are below.
Alumni
Former InterACT lab members and their current whereabouts:
- Graduate students: Dorsa Sadigh (tenure-track at Stanford), Jaime Fisac (tenure-track at Princeton), Sandy Huang (research scientist at DeepMind), and Dylan Hadfield-Menell (about to be tenure-track at MIT).
- Undergraduate students: Micah Caroll (now PhD at Berkeley), Gokul Swamy (now PhD at CMU), Ravi Panya (now PhD at CMU), Hong Jun Jeon (CRA finalist, now PhD at Stanford), Nick Landolfi (now PhD at Stanford), Allan Zhou (now PhD at Stanford), Andy Palaniappan (now PhD at Stanford), Dhruv Malik (still at Berkeley), Jason Zhang (now PhD at CMU), Minae Kwon (now PhD at Stanford), Lawrence Chan (now PhD at Berkeley), S. Milli (CRA finalist, now PhD at Berkeley), Glen Chao (now PhD at U. Michigan), Rachel Holladay (now PhD at MIT), Kenton Lee (PhD from UW)
Outreach
- I founded the AI4ALL BAIR Camp at UC Berkeley, a summer camp on human-centered AI for high school students from low income backgrounds. The camp is in its 5th year, bringing 23-25 students to the Berkeley campus for a week. This is a partnership with AI4ALL and Lawerence Hall of Science.
- In general, I enjoy teaching K-12 students about AI and its interaction with humans, and inspiring them to love math. I give guest lectures, host summer interns, and collaborate with teachers from local schools. If you're a Bay Area teacher and would like to get involved, please do get in touch!
- I make a point to speak at women in tech event and to guest lecture in CS classes so that students get more exposed to female CS faculty.
Selected Honors and Awards
- IEEE RAS Early Academic Career Award in Robotics and Automation, 2021.
- McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching, 2020
- PECASE (Preseidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering), 2019.
- Sloan Fellow 2018
- NSF CAREER 2017 Towards Autonomously Generating Robot Behavior for Coordination with Humans -- Accounting for Effects on Human Actions
- ONR Young Investigator Award 2020: A Unified Framework for Inferring Rewards from Diverse Types of Human Feedback
- Okawa Foundation Award 2017
- MIT Tech Review 35 innovators under 35 (2017)
- Papers:
- 2020 IEEE Transactions on Robotics King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Honorable Mention: Quantifying Hypothesis Space Misspecification in Learning from Human-Robot Demonstrations and Physical Corrections
- Best paper finalist at HRI 2021: "Feature-expansive reward learning: rethinking human input"
- Best paper award at HRI 2020: "LESS is More: Rethinking Probabilistic Models of Human Behavior"
- Best paper finalist at HRI 2018: "Expressing Robot Incapability"
- Best student paper finalist at IROS 2018: "Configuration Space Metrics"
- Best cognitive robotics paper finalist at IROS 2016: "Active Information Gathering over Human Internal State"
- Best HRI paper finalist at ICRA 2016: "SHIV: Reducing Supervisor Burden for Efficient Learning from Demonstration".
- Best paper finalist at ICRA 2015: "Motion Primitives via Optimization".
- Best paper finalist at RSS 2013: "Generating Legible Motion".
- Best paper finalist at Roman 2012: "Online Customization of Teleoperation Interfaces".
- Best paper finalist at RSS 2012: "Formalizing Assistive Teleoperation".
- Keynotes:
- IROS 2018 Keynote
- CoRL 2017 Keynote.
- IJCAI Early Career Spotlight 2018
- ICAPS 2019 Keynote
- Baylearn 2019 Keynote
Selected Professional Activities
- Program Co-Chair, Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2018
- Steering Committee, Berkeley AI Research Lab (BAIR).
- Co-PI, Center for Human-Compatible AI
- Chair, Bay Area Robotics Symposium (BARS) 2016, 2017.
- Workshop Chair, RSS 2016.
- Area chair / associate editor for THRI, AURO (special issue), ICRA, IROS, HRI.
Selected Press
- Forbes: Meet the woman teaching AI about human values
- Wired: Anca Dragan Speaks at Wired25
- NPR Marketplace: Robots use game theory to understand how we think and Say hello to your robot co-worker and The most robot-proof job of them all
- Lex Fridman AI Podcast: Human-Robot Interaction and Reward Engineering
- The Atlantic: Robots that act differently when you're around
- Berkeley Engineer (Cover): Life with machine: robot relationships get real
- IEEE Spectrum: Autonomoucs cars could determine your driving style by gently probing you
- IEEE Spectrum: Helping robots express themselves when they fail
- Medium: The future of AI needs more humans in it
- Wired: 4 Things Robots Need to Learn Before Working With Humans
- Wired: What is a robot
- Wired: You aren't ready for the weirness of working with robots
- Wired: To survive the streets, robocars must learn to think like humans
- New Scientist: Robots will be more useful if they are made to lack confidence
- SF Chronicle: Humanizing cars, sensitizing humans