Zana Buçinca
Researcher @Microsoft | Incoming Asst. Prof. @MIT
Hi there! I’m a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft in the Office of Applied Research, working with Brent Hecht and Jaime Teevan. Starting Fall 2026, I will join MIT as an Assistant Professor with a shared appointment in Sloan and EECS. I will be recruiting 1-2 PhD students in this upcoming cycle (through MIT EECS)!
I recently completed my PhD at Harvard, where I was fortunate to be advised by Professor Krzysztof Gajos and to 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 PhD research was partially supported by an IBM PhD Fellowship and a Siebel Scholarship.
Originally, I come from the capital city of a small country in southeastern Europe - Prishtina, Kosovo.
I like mischief, adventures, and mornings.
selected work
- CHIContrastive Explanations That Anticipate Human Misconceptions Can Improve Human Decision-Making SkillsIn Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2025
- CSCWTo trust or to think: cognitive forcing functions can reduce overreliance on AI in AI-assisted decision-makingIn Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 2021
- IUIProxy Tasks and Subjective Measures Can Be Misleading in Evaluating Explainable AI SystemsIn Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2020