Zana Buçinca

PhD Candidate @Harvard

zbucinca_cropped.png

Hi there! I’m a PhD Candidate at Harvard, where I’m fortunate to be advised by Professor Krzysztof Gajos. I also collaborate closely with Professor Finale Doshi-Velez.

My research interests lie primarily at the intersection of HCI and Responsible AI. I design human-AI interaction techniques that complement people and amplify their values in AI-assisted work. To achieve this, I focus on (1) understanding how people make AI-assisted decisions and (2) designing novel interaction paradigms, explanations, and systems that optimize both task-centric outcomes, such as accuracy and efficiency, and human-centric outcomes, such as enhancing human skills and agency in AI-assisted tasks.

Over the course of my PhD, I spent two wonderful summers interning at Microsoft Research, where I was hosted by Dr. Saleema Amershi & Dr. Alexandra Olteanu in 2021 and Dr. Jennifer Wortman Vaughan & Dr. Alexandra Chouldechova in 2022.

My research has been supported by an IBM PhD Fellowship and a Siebel Scholarship.

Prior to Harvard, I obtained a master’s degree in Computer Science from Koc University in Istanbul, Turkey, and a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Izmir Institute of Technology in Izmir, Turkey.

Originally, I come from the capital city of a small country in southeastern Europe - Prishtina, Kosovo.

I like mischief, adventures, and mornings.

selected work

  1. CHI
    contrastive_explanations.png
    Contrastive Explanations That Anticipate Human Misconceptions Can Improve Human Decision-Making Skills
    Zana Buçinca, Siddharth Swaroop, Amanda E Paluch, and 2 more authors
    In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025
  2. arXiv
    offline_RL_preview.jpg
    Towards Optimizing Human-Centric Objectives in AI-Assisted Decision-Making With Offline Reinforcement Learning
    Zana Buçinca, Siddharth Swaroop, Amanda E Paluch, and 2 more authors
    (under review) arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05911, 2024
  3. arXiv
    aha_preview.png
    AHA!: Facilitating AI Impact Assessment by Generating Examples of Harms
    Zana Buçinca, Chau Minh Pham, Maurice Jakesch, and 3 more authors
    (under review) arXiv e-prints, 2023
  4. CSCW
    trust_or_think_preview.png
    To trust or to think: cognitive forcing functions can reduce overreliance on AI in AI-assisted decision-making
    Zana Buçinca, Maja Barbara Malaya, and Krzysztof Z Gajos
    In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2021
  5. IUI
    proxy_task_preview_oneline.png
    Proxy Tasks and Subjective Measures Can Be Misleading in Evaluating Explainable AI Systems
    Zana Buçinca, Phoebe Lin, Krzysztof Z. Gajos, and 1 more author
    In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2020