#81 – Anca Dragan: Human-Robot Interaction and Reward Engineering

Anca Dragan is a professor at Berkeley, working on human-robot
interaction -- algorithms that look beyond the robot's function in
isolation, and generate robot behavior that accounts for
interaction and coordination with human beings. Support this
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"LexPodcast"  EPISODE LINKS: Anca's Twitter:
https://twitter.com/ancadianadragan Anca's Website:
https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~anca/ This conversation is part
of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you would like to
get more information about this podcast go to
https://lexfridman.com/ai or connect with @lexfridman on Twitter,
LinkedIn, Facebook, Medium, or YouTube where you can watch the
video versions of these conversations. If you enjoy the podcast,
please rate it 5 stars on Apple Podcasts, follow on Spotify, or
support it on Patreon. Here's the outline of the episode. On some
podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump
to that time. OUTLINE: 00:00 - Introduction 02:26 - Interest in
robotics 05:32 - Computer science 07:32 - Favorite robot 13:25 -
How difficult is human-robot interaction? 32:01 - HRI application
domains 34:24 - Optimizing the beliefs of humans 45:59 - Difficulty
of driving when humans are involved 1:05:02 - Semi-autonomous
driving 1:10:39 - How do we specify good rewards? 1:17:30 - Leaked
information from human behavior 1:21:59 - Three laws of robotics
1:26:31 - Book recommendation 1:29:02 - If a doctor gave you 5
years to live... 1:32:48 - Small act of kindness 1:34:31 - Meaning
of life