Michelle Vaccaro is a PhD candidate in MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society, where she studies human-AI interaction, focusing on how people and AI should—and should not—work together in organizations. To this end, she concentrates on:
- Identifying the conditions for human-AI synergy, when the human-AI combination performs better than both humans and AI alone.
- Testing and extending established theories about human behavior to AI and human-AI contexts.
- Developing human-AI safety evaluations that ask not just whether a model can emit dangerous content, but how much it magnifies a user’s capacity to carry out harmful actions.
Before coming to MIT, Michelle worked at Goldman Sachs in foreign exchange strategy and structuring. She earned her Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Harvard College, where she graduated summa cum laude with highest departmental honors in computer science and received the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for her undergraduate thesis.
Contact: vaccaro at mit dot edu