Anca Dragan
Anca Dragan is an associate professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. Her goal is to enable AI agents to work with, around, and in support of people. Anca runs the InterACT Lab, which focuses on algorithms for human-AI interaction—algorithms that move beyond the agent's function in isolation, and generate robot behavior that coordinates well with people, and is aligned with what we actually want the agent to do. InterACT Lab works across different applications, from robotics (assistive arms, quadrotors, autonomous cars), to recommender systems, to large language models, and draw from optimal control and decision theory, game theory, reinforcement learning, Bayesian inference, and cognitive science. Anca also helped found and serve on the steering committee for the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) Lab, and is a co-PI of the Center for Human-Compatible AI. She has been honored by the Sloan Fellowship, MIT TR35, the Okawa award, an NSF CAREER award, and the PECASE award.
-
Essays and Scholarship
Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media
Engagement-based algorithms often amplify divisive content and fail to meet user preferences. What's the alternative?
By Smitha Milli , Micah Carroll , Yike Wang , Sashrika Pandey , Sebastian Zhao & Anca Dragan