Zana Buçinca

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

CHI

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

Honorable Mention Bib PDF

Best Paper Honorable Mention Award

@inproceedings{buccinca2024contrastive,
  author = {Bu{\c{c}}inca, Zana and Swaroop, Siddharth and Paluch, Amanda E and Doshi-Velez, Finale and Gajos, Krzysztof Z},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  series = {CHI '25},
  title = {Contrastive Explanations That Anticipate Human Misconceptions Can Improve Human Decision-Making Skills},
  year = {2025},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04253},
}

arXiv

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

Bib PDF

@article{buccinca2024towards,
  author = {Bu{\c{c}}inca, Zana and Swaroop, Siddharth and Paluch, Amanda E and Murphy, Susan A and Gajos, Krzysztof Z},
  journal = {(under review) arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.05911},
  title = {Towards Optimizing Human-Centric Objectives in AI-Assisted Decision-Making With Offline Reinforcement Learning},
  year = {2024},
}

arXiv

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

Bib PDF

@article{bucinca2023aha,
  title = {AHA!: Facilitating AI Impact Assessment by Generating Examples of Harms},
  author = {Bu{\c{c}}inca, Zana and Pham, Chau Minh and Jakesch, Maurice and Tulio Ribeiro, Marco and Olteanu, Alexandra and Amershi, Saleema},
  journal = {(under review) arXiv e-prints},
  pages = {arXiv--2306},
  year = {2023},
}

CSCW

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

Bib PDF Sketch credits

Many thanks to Chris Noessel at IBM for crafting and sharing this fun sketch that beautifully reflects the ideas of our paper.

@article{buccinca2021trust,
  title = {To trust or to think: cognitive forcing functions can reduce overreliance on AI in AI-assisted decision-making},
  author = {Bu{\c{c}}inca, Zana and Malaya, Maja Barbara and Gajos, Krzysztof Z},
  journal = {In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction},
  volume = {5},
  number = {CSCW1},
  pages = {1--21},
  year = {2021},
  notes_name = {Sketch credits},
  notes = {Many thanks to <a href="https://about.me/chrisnoessel">Chris Noessel</a> at IBM for crafting and sharing this fun sketch that beautifully reflects the ideas of our paper.},
  publisher = {ACM New York, NY, USA},
}

IUI

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

Best Paper Award Bib PDF

Best Paper Award

@inproceedings{bucinca20:proxy,
  address = {New York, NY, USA},
  author = {Bu\c{c}inca, Zana and Lin, Phoebe and Gajos, Krzysztof Z. and Glassman, Elena L.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces},
  publisher = {ACM},
  pubtype = {conference},
  series = {IUI '20},
  title = {Proxy Tasks and Subjective Measures Can Be Misleading in Evaluating Explainable AI Systems},
  year = {2020},
  dimensions = {true},
}