Shorter

Sydney Katz is co-founder and CTO at Valgo, a company focused on building safety validation tooling to support autonomous systems development and certification. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at Stanford University advised by Professor Mykel Kochenderfer in the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL). Her research was focused on the design and validation of safety-critical decision-making systems, and she is an author of the textbook Algorithms for Validation. Sydney received her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2023 and her M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2020. Before coming to Stanford, she received her B.S. and B.S.A.S in Electrical and Systems Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018. During this time, she gained work experience at multiple aerospace companies including Reliable Robotics, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (where she worked on the Airborne Collision Avoidance System X, or ACAS X), the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and the NASA Glenn Research Center.

Longer

Sydney Katz is co-founder and CTO at Valgo, a company focused on building safety validation tooling to support autonomous systems development and certification. Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at Stanford University advised by Professor Mykel Kochenderfer in the Stanford Intelligent Systems Laboratory (SISL). Her research was focused on the design and validation of safety-critical decision-making systems, and she is an author of the textbook Algorithms for Validation. Her dissertation work specifically studied safe machine learning-based perception, which requires techniques that tackle the challenges posed by the high-dimensional nature of many perception problems. While she is interested in a variety of application areas, her work has had a particular focus in the aviation domain. Her research has been applied to aircraft collision avoidance, vision-based aircraft detect and avoid, and vision-based aircraft taxi navigation.

Sydney received her Ph.D. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2023 and her M.S. in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University in 2020. She received her B.S. and B.S.A.S in Electrical and Systems Engineering from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018, where she was valedictorian. During this time, she gained work experience at multiple aerospace companies including Reliable Robotics, MIT Lincoln Laboratory (where she worked on the Airborne Collision Avoidance System X, or ACAS X), the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, and the NASA Glenn Research Center.