Biosketch
Ana is a doctoral researcher in Media Informatics at LMU Munich, supervised by Prof. Andreas Butz and co-supervised by Prof. Enkelejda Kasneci. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and later completed an MSc in Mind and Brain at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. During her MSc, she conducted research at the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence and TU Berlin’s Brains, Minds & Bots group, where she gained experience in social cognition, human-robot interaction, behavioral experimentation, eye tracking, and EEG. Her work has focused on how people perceive, interpret, and respond to artificial agents, providing the foundation for her current research in human-AI interaction.
relAI Research
Her research investigates how the social and emotional behavior of AI systems shapes human trust, reliance, and decision-making. She is particularly interested in when socially engaging AI promotes appropriate reliance, and when it instead drives over-reliance or under-reliance. She combines interactive AI prototypes with behavioral experiments and implicit measures from cognitive neuroscience to study users’ responses beyond self-report. The broader goal is to understand how interpersonal design choices in AI affect human behavior and to translate these findings into principles for safer and more reliably calibrated human-AI interaction.