Anca Dragan

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 recenty started as an Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley. Highlights of my activities and awards are below. Outreach

I founded and am now organizing the 2nd edition of BAIR Camp at UC Berkeley, a summer camp on human-centered AI for high school students from low income backgrounds. This is a collaboration between InterACT, BAIR, CHAI, CITRIS CPAER, and the non-profit organization AI4ALL. You can also read more here. In general, I enjoy teaching kids about robots and their interaction with humans, and inspiring them to love math. I give guest lectures, host summer interns, and collaborate with teachers from local schools like Carlmont, Branham, and the San Francisco International High School. If you're a Bay Area teacher and would like to get involved, please do get in touch! I find it important that the younger generation (young men and women alike), gets exposed to as many women doing STEM work as possible. I also find it important that the younger generation learns to think about artificial intelligence and interaction with people in an integrated way, rather than thinking about them as completely seperate areas. To this end, I give algorithmic interaction talks at women in STEM evens (FemTech, Women in Tech Summit), but also to our Berkeley undergraduates (EECS honors, HKN, transfer students).

Honors and Awards

• Best student paper finalist at IROS 2018: "Configuration Space Metrics"
• IROS 2018 Keynote
• IJCAI Early Career Spotlight 2018
• CoRL 2017 Keynote.
• Sloan Fellow 2018
• Best paper finalist at HRI 2018: "Expressing Robot Incapability"
• MIT Tech Review 35 innovators under 35 (2017)
• Okawa Foundation Award 2017
• Forbes 30 under 30 Romania
• NSF CAREER 2017 Towards Autonomously Generating Robot Behavior for Coordination with Humans -- Accounting for Effects on Human Actions
• 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".
• Siebel Scholarship, 2015.
• Best reviewer award finalist at R:SS, 2014
• Dan David Scholarship for Artificial Intelligence, 2014.
• CITEC Award for Excellence in Doctoral HRI Research, HRI 2014.
• Best paper finalist at RSS 2013: "Generating Legible Motion".
• Intel PhD Fellowship, 2013.
• Best paper finalist at Roman 2012: "Online Customization of Teleoperation Interfaces".
• Best paper finalist at RSS 2012: "Formalizing Assistive Teleoperation".
• Google Anita Borg Scholar, 2012.
• HRI Pioneer, 2011.

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
• Organizer, Bay Area Robotics Symposium (BARS) 2016, 2017.
• Workshop Chair, RSS 2016.
• Associated Editor (or equivalent): THRI (Computational HRI track), AURO (special issue), ICRA 2017, IROS 2016, HRI 2016 and 2018, ARSO 2015.
• Organizer, Algorithms for HRI Workshop, Paris 2016.
• Organizer, Planning for HRI Workshop, RSS 2016.
• Organizer, Algorithms for HRI Workshop, Berkeley 2015.
• Organizer, Robot Learning Workshop, ICML 2013.
• Organizer, Human-Robot Collaboration Workshop, RSS 2013.
• Organizer, Collaborative Manipulation Workshop, HRI 2013.
• Reviewer, IJRR, AURO, JHRI, RSS, ICRA, IROS, HRI, Ro-Man, IJCAI, WAFR, NIPS.

Selected Press

• Forbes: Meet the woman teaching AI about human values
• 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
• NPR Marketplace: Say hello to your robot co-worker and The most robot-proof job of them all
• 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