Andrea Bajcsy

Andrea Bajcsy is an Assistant Professor in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University where she leads the Interactive and Trustworthy Robotics Lab (Intent Lab). She broadly works at the intersection of robotics, machine learning, control theory, and human-AI interaction. Prior to joining CMU, Andrea received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley in 2022. She is the recipient of the DARPA Young Faculty Award (2025), NSF CAREER Award (2025), Amazon Research Award (2025), Google Research Scholar Award (2024), Finalist for Best Paper Award of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Control (2024), Rising Stars in EECS Award (2021), Honorable Mention for the T-RO Best Paper Award (2020), and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (2016).

AI2050 Project

AI models that understand images and text are used by millions of people daily. The next step is bringing them into the physical world through robots. In the near future, people may download general-purpose robot “brains” and deploy robots in homes, hospitals, and cities. But these systems are trained on massive, hidden datasets, making their behavior unpredictable and potentially unsafe. Bajcsy’s project introduces a new framework, called “safety steering”, for guiding robot behavior at deployment-time. By helping robots interpret instructions, predict the consequences of their actions, and ask for help, this project will make future robots easier to deploy responsibly.