https://youtu.be/AQ-w5o2oGI8

Abstract: From autonomous cars to quadrotors to mobile manipulators, robots need to co-exist and even collaborate with humans. In this talk, we will explore how our formalism for decision making needs to change to account for this interaction, and dig our heels into the subtleties of modeling human behavior — sometimes strategic, often irrational, and nearly always influenceable. Towards the end, I’ll try to convince you that every robotics task is actually a human-robot interaction task (its specification lies with a human!) and how this view has shaped our more recent work.

Brief Bio: Anca Dragan is an Assistant Professor in EECS at UC Berkeley, where she runs the InterACT lab. Her goal is to enable robots to work with, around, and in support of people. She works on algorithms for a) coordinating with people in shared spaces, and b) learning what people want the robot to do in the first place. She is also a Staff Research Scientist at Waymo, where she advises the Behavior team, who is responsible for prediction and planning. Anca did her Ph.D. in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University on legible motion planning. At Berkeley, she helped found the Berkeley AI Research Lab, is a co-PI for the Center for Human-Compatible AI. Anca has been honored by the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the Sloan Fellowship, the NSF CAREER award, the Okawa award, MIT’s TR35, and an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight.

Host: Henny Admoni

For Appointments: Stephanie Matvey (smatvey@andrew.cmu.edu)