Colloquium Details
Learning and Incentives in Human-AI Interaction
Speaker: Natalie Collina, University of Pennsylvania
Location: 60 Fifth Avenue 150
Date: April 1, 2026, 2 p.m.
Host: Andrew Wilson, Julia Stoyanovich
Synopsis:
Modern AI systems interact repeatedly with humans and with each other, shaping marketplaces and downstream decisions. I study learning and strategic interaction in these human-AI systems, with the goal of understanding when these interactions lead to complementarity and alignment, and when they instead produce collusion or instability. In this talk I will focus on two threads. First, I will present models of human-AI complementarity, showing how humans and AI systems with different information can, through repeated interaction, reach accurate, consistent predictions without a shared prior, while guaranteeing that good-faith participants are never harmed by collaborating. Second, I will describe an AI selection game in which a human chooses among partially misaligned AI advisors, and show that under a natural “market alignment” condition, competition among advisors guarantees outcomes close to those of a perfectly aligned assistant. I will briefly discuss how these results connect to my work on algorithmic collusion in markets and on “menus” of algorithms that make the long-run commitments of learning systems explicit and robust.
Speaker Bio:
Natalie Collina is a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is advised by Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth. She works on the foundations of responsible AI. She is especially interested in understanding repeated strategic interactions between human and AI agents. Natalie’s work has been awarded with an IBM PhD Fellowship in Trustworthy AI and a joint Best Paper Award/Best Student Paper Award from the ACM Conference for Economics and Computation. She has been recognized as a Rising Star in EECS and her work has been featured in Quanta and Wired magazines. Natalie graduated from undergrad at Princeton University in 2019. From 2019-2021, she was a software engineer at Google. In Summer 2025 she interned at Microsoft Research New England, hosted by Alex Slivkins.
Notes:
In-person attendance only available to those with active NYU ID cards.