Kristy Sakano

Hi!👋🏼 My name is Kristy and I’m a third-year Ph.D. student in Computer Science at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Dr. Mumu Xu of the Department of Aerospace Engineering. I’m also part of the GAMMA Lab in the Department of Computer Science which is where you’ll find me most days.

I’m broadly interested in formal verification and model checking for autonomous cyber-physical systems that operate in messy, real-world environments. My work combines human feedback, Signal Temporal Logic (STL), and vision-language models (VLMs) to encode informal human rules as formal specifications and enforce them at runtime 🤖

I care about building systems that are verifiable, explainable, and grounded in human intent, and my current research revolves around:

• Integrating human feedback into formal verification pipelines 💬
• Using VLMs to bridge natural language and safety logic in autonomous robot navigation 📸
• Runtime enforcement of temporal logic specifications ⏱️
• Evaluating robot compliance with real-world, human-defined safety standards 📝

This upcoming summer (2026), I’ll be interning at the Department of Transportation Highly Automated Systems Safety Center of Excellence (DOT HASS COE), where I’ll work on safety and assurance of automated driving systems 🚗 The intersection of regulation, safety and verification is exactly where I want to be - a perfect pit stop for a transit enthusiast who believes all traffic lights deserve formal proofs 🚦✨

This past summer (2025), I interned at National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), co-authoring a white paper examining ideologically motivated cybercrimes and their intersection with modern conflict, psychology, and state involvement.

Before my PhD, I worked at NAWCAD Patuxent River (2018-2024) as an Operations Research Analyst and Autonomous Systems Scientist, where I collaborated as a visiting scientist with NASA Goddard (2021) and interned at the Naval Research Laboratory (2019). I earned my MS in Computer Science with a focus on Computational Perception & Robotics at Georgia Tech through their Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS) program in 2023 🐝, and a BS in Physics with Astrophysics concentration from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2018 🐏

One fun fact: during my undergrad, I conducted research at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics through a Smithsonian-funded program, studying pulsating star systems. That work remains my most cited paper to date 🌟