Invited Talk #1 - Serena Booth

Serena Booth studies how people write specifications for AI systems and how people assess whether AI systems are successful in learning from their specifications. Serena's work is often conducted in the context of reinforcement learning, and her work is sometimes physically embodied, too, i.e. as robots.

Serena received her PhD at MIT CSAIL in 2023. She is a graduate of Harvard College (2016) and former Associate Product Manager at Google. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and the UK AI Security Institute. She has been recognized as a CIFAR Global Scholar (2025), Human-Robot Interaction Pioneer (2023), and as a Rising Star in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (2022).