Akanksha is a Research Scientist in the Reinforcement Learning group at Sony Research. Her research focuses on modeling human behavior across multimodal interfaces and designing human-interactive machine learning algorithms for sequential decision-making settings such as imitation learning, interaction-grounded learning, and active learning. She is particularly interested in alleviating barriers of access for end-users who can benefit from interactive machine learning algorithms in the real-world. Her interdisciplinary work attempts to (1) further the understanding of how humans interact with artificial learning agents and (2) design efficient algorithms which leverage varied forms of human data for real-world interactive applications. Previously, Akanksha was a postdoc in the Reinforcement Learning group at Microsoft Research and earned her PhD from the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, MS in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University, and Bachelors of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur.