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Members of the InterACT Lab:

Anca Dragan
Anca is an Assistant Professor in the EECS Department at UC Berkeley. She founded the InterACT lab, and helped found the Berkeley AI Research (BAIR) lab. She obtained her PhD from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Post Doc

Daniel Brown
Daniel is a postdoc at UC Berkeley, co-advised by Anca Dragan and Ken Goldberg. His research interests include imitation learning, reward inference, AI safety, and multi-agent systems. He recently received his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, where he worked with Scott Niekum on safe imitation learning. Prior to starting his PhD, Daniel worked for the Air Force Research Lab's Information Directorate where he studied bio-inspired swarms and multi-agent planning.

Graduate

Andrea Bajcsy
Andrea is a PhD student in EECS. She is broadly interested in the intersection of robotics, control theory, machine learning, and human-robot interaction. Much of her research focuses on combining data-driven human models and control theoretic-tools to develop robust human motion predictors and safe motion planners for robots operating in close physical proximity to people.
Kush Bhatia
Kush is a PhD student in EECS. He is interested in problems at the intersection of statistics, optimization and machine learning, in particular on aspects of aligning the objectives of the ML models with those of humans.
Andreea Bobu
Andreea is a PhD student in EECS. Her interests lie broadly at the intersection of machine learning, robotics, and human-robot interaction. Her research tackles ways in which autonomous systems’ models of the world and of other agents (e.g. humans) can go wrong, and improve them for enhanced interaction between people and robots.
Ellis Ratner
Ellis is a PhD student in EECS. He researches planning and decision making algorithms for robotic systems. Recently, he has focused on developing algorithms for efficient planning under uncertainty using graph search methods.
Smitha Milli
Smitha is a PhD student in EECS. She is focused on making ML systems more reliable and robust. She is particularly interested in how to use interaction with humans to ensure that a system has learned the right objective or behavior.
Sid Reddy
Sid is a PhD student in EECS. His goal is to accelerate the advent of intelligent robotic assistants, like brain-computer interfaces for prosthetic limb control and guidance systems for visually-impaired users. His research develops machine learning algorithms for augmenting human control and inferring models of human beliefs, preferences, and behavior.
Lawrence Chan
Lawrence is a PhD student in EECS. He focuses on learning human objectives despite systematic human biases. Lawrence is also an undergraduate alumn of the lab.
Jerry Zhi-Yang He
Jerry is a PhD student in EECS. He wants to build household robots that interact with humans while perfoming a wide range of tasks. To that end, he is interested in algorithms that can learn from all forms of human inputs, including desmontrations, reward designs, vision as well as language feedbacks.
Micah Caroll
Micah is a PhD student in EECS. He is interested in the emergent phenomena of humans' interactions with AI agents in the real world. In particular, he focuses on how to design AI agents capable of achieving good outcomes when with interacting with real humans – mainly by having realistic models of human behavior.
Xiaocheng Mesut Yang
Mesut is a Master's student in EECS.

Undergraduate

Arjun Sripathy
Arjun is a undergraduate student in EECS.
Matthew Zurek
Matthew is a undergraduate student in EECS.
Jensen Gao
Jensen is a undergraduate student in EECS.
Sean Chen
Sean is a undergraduate student in EECS.
Nathan Miller
Nathan is a undergraduate student in EECS.
Avik Jain
Avik is a undergraduate student in EECS.

Alumni (graduates):

Dorsa Sadigh (now at Stanford)
Dorsa worked on enabling robots to better coordinate with people by accounting for the influence they ahve on human actions. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Stanford University.
Jaime Fisac (now at Princeton)
Jaime completed his PhD in EECS in 2019. After spending a year as a Research Scientist at Waymo (formerly known as Google’s Self-Driving Car project), he is joining Princeton an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering. He’s interested in ensuring the safe operation of robots in complex and uncertain environments, especially around people.
Sandy Huang (now at DeepMind)
Sandy worked on enabling robot transparency and helping users attain a good mental model of how the robot acts through informative behaviors. She is current a Research Scientist at Deep Mind.
Stephen Hansen (now at Freedom Robotics)
Stephen obtained his Master's degree in EECS with the InterACT lab. He is now the head of robotics at Freedom Robotics.
Dylan Hadfield-Menell (now at MIT)
His research is on value alignment and enabling robots and AI agents to be robust to misspecified objectives Dylan is currently an Assistant Professor at MIT.
Rohin Shah (now at DeepMind)
While Rohin's general interests in CS are very broad, including AI, machine learning, programming languages, complexity theory, algorithms, and security, he was convinced that it is really important for us to build safe, aligned AI. His research focuses on how to provide specifications of good behavior in ways other than reward functions, especially ones that do not require much human effort. He is currently a Research Scientist at DeepMind.

Alumni (undergraduates):

Gokul Swamy (CMU)
Gokul was an undergraduate and masters student in EECS. He is generally interested in systems, robotic or otherwise, that can learn effectively from data generated via interaction with people. He is especially excited about incorporating these sorts of systems in a scalable manner into personal robots. He is currently a PhD student at CMU RI.
Ravi Pandya (CMU)
Ravi was an undergraduate and masters student in InterACT working on how physical actions can communicate and gather information.
Allan Zhou (Stanford)
Allan was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on robot motion with style.
Minae Kwon (Stanford)
Minae was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on communicating incapability.
Nick Landolfi (Stanford)
Nick Landolfi was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on control for autonomous cars that interact with people and robot arms that infer human intent.
Jason Zhang (CMU)
Jason was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on learning from corrections.
Hong Jun Jeon (Stanford)
Hong was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on natural robot motion.
Malayandi (Andy) Palaniappan (Stanford)
Andy was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on human-robot collaboration.
Dhruv Malik (Berkeley)
Dhruv was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on human-robot collaboration.
McKane Andrus (Partnership for AI)
McKane was an undergraduate and masters student in InterACT working on the cooperative control of robots. He is a Research Associate at the Partnership for AI.
Steven Wang (CHAI research engineer)
Steven was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on detecting human model misspecification.
Eli Bronstein (Symbio)
Eli was an undergraduate student in InterACT working on game-thoretic driving.
Glen Chou (U Michigan)
Glen was a part of the Interact Lab while an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley. He is currently a PhD student at the University of Michigan.

Collaborators:

  • Pieter Abbeel
  • Ken Goldberg
  • Stuart Russell
  • Shankar Sastry
  • Claire Tomlin
  • Sanjit Seshia
  • Ruzena Bajcsy
  • Tom Griffits
  • Trevor Darrell
  • Peter Bartlett
  • Sergey Levine
  • Moritz Hardt
  • Becoming a Member:

  • Berkeley graduate students: Send email to Anca! Also, it will be useful to take the Algorithmic Human-Robot Interaction course.
  • Perspective graduate students: We would love to talk to you after you get admitted. Please apply to the CS (or EECS) PhD program under the AI (or CIR) areas.
  • Berkeley undergraduate students: Send email to Anca summarizing your project experience, what areas from our Research page you are interested in, and how much time you are able to commit. Attach you transcript and resume.
  • Non-Berkeley undergraduate students: Unfortunately, we do not offer internships to non-Berkeley undergraduates.