Misha Sra

Bio: Misha Sra is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara where she directs the Human-AI Experience (HAX) Lab. Misha received her PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 2018 advised by Prof. Pattie Maes. She has published at the most selective HCI, VR, and AI venues such as ACM CHI, UIST, IEEE VR, EMNLP and CVPR where she received several best paper awards and honorable mentions. MIT selected her as an EECS Rising Star in 2018. In 2023, she was awarded an NSF CAREER Award for her work in spatial human-AI interaction design.

Research: Most AI interactions today happen through text in a chat box. But much of human learning and expertise is physical, embodied, and spatial. Our lab explores how we can bring AI into the physical environments where we live, work, learn and play.

We are an interdisciplinary team that designs, builds, and evaluates human-AI systems from interaction prototypes and design toolkits to hardware platforms. We study human-AI collaboration with the goal of moving beyond today's explicit interactions (typing prompts, clicking buttons) toward more implicit, seamless collaboration through gaze, gesture, movement, and spatial awareness. Through extended reality (XR) interfaces and physical embodiments such as robots and drones, we explore the design of systems that see what we see, provide feedback in our tasks, and understand context the way another person would. We call this Spatial Human-AI Interaction.

By bringing AI into real world spaces as a presence that sees, responds, and adapts, we are not just building better tools. We are expanding what's possible in the environments that shape us.