Anca Dragan: Human-Robot Interaction and Reward Engineering | Lex Fridman Podcast #81

The following is a conversation with Anca Dragan, a professor at Berkeley working on human-robot interaction, algorithms that look beyond the robot's function and isolation and generate robot behavior that accounts for interaction and coordination with human beings. She also consults at Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company. But in this conversation, she's 100% wearing her Berkeley hat. She's one of the most brilliant and fun roboticists in the world to talk with. I had a tough and crazy day leading up to this conversation, so I was a bit tired, even more so than usual. (laughs) But, uh, almost immediately as she walked in, her energy, passion, and excitement for human-robot interaction was contagious. So I had a lot of fun and really enjoyed this conversation. This is the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, review it with five stars on Apple podcast, support it on Patreon, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D-M-A-N. As usual, I'll do one or two minutes of ads now and never any ads in the middle that can break the flow of the conversation. I hope that works for you and doesn't hurt the listening experience. This show is presented by Cash App, the number one finance app in the App Store. When you get it, use code LEXPODCAST. Cash App lets you send money to friends, buy Bitcoin, and invest in the stock market with as little as $1. Since Cash App does fractional share trading, let me mention that the order execution algorithm that works behind the scenes to create the abstraction of fractional orders is an algorithmic marvel. So big props to the Cash App engineers for solving a hard problem that, in the end, provides an easy interface that takes a step up to the next layer of abstraction over the stock market, making trading more accessible for new investors and diversification much easier. So again, you get Cash App from the App Store or Google Play and use the code LEXPODCAST, you get $10 and Cash App will also donate $10 to FIRST, an organization that is helping to advance robotics and STEM education for young people around the world. And now, here's my conversation with Anca Dragan. When did you first fall in love with robotics?

I think it was a very gradual process and it was somewhat accidental actually, because I first started getting into programming when I was a kid, and then into math, and then into comp- I decided computer science was the thing I was gonna do, and then in college I got into AI, and then I applied to the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon. And I was coming from this little school in Germany that no one e- nobody had heard of, but I had spent an exchange semester at Carnegie Mellon, so I had letters from Carnegie Mellon. So that was the only pl- you know, MIT said no, Berkeley said no, Stanford said no. That was the only place I got into, so I went there to the Robotics Institute. And I thought that robotics is a really cool way to actually apply the stuff that I knew and loved, like optimization. So that's how I got into robotics. I have a better story how I got into cars, which is I, you know, I used to do mostly manipulation in my PhD, but now I do kind of a bit of everything application-wise, including cars. And I got into cars because I was here in Berkeley while I was a PhD student still for RSS 2014.