I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Oregon State University, where I lead the Intelligent and Reliable Autonomous Systems (IRAS) research group. I am also an affiliate member of the Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CoRIS) Institute at Oregon State University. I earned my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I was advised by  Shlomo Zilberstein.

My research interests are in designing AI systems that are safe, reliable, and unbiased. My current research focus is on developing techniques for reliable decision-making in autonomous systems that operate in fully and partially observable environments. I am a recipient of the NSF CAREER award, Outstanding Paper Award at RLC 2025, Outstanding Program Committee Member Award at ICAPS 2022, IJCAI 2020 Distinguished Paper Award, and a Rising Stars in EECS 2020 workshop participant. I serve as a Program Co-Chair of the International Conference on Automated Planning and Scheduling (ICAPS), 2026. 

Contact: sandhya.sai AT oregonstate.edu
Office: 3005 Kelley Engineering Center
 

Recent News

Spring 2026:

  • Our paper on hybrid modeling for crop prediction tasks using multi-task learning has been accepted to IJCAI 2026!

Winter 2026:

  • Our grape phenology prediction model has been deployed on AgWeatherNet! This model is now available to over 26000 growers to guide their vineyard management!

  • IRAS group member Alina Hyk recognized with OSU Honors College Joe Hendricks Scholarship for Academic Excellence! Congratulations, Alina!

  • Our paper on learning transferable latent user preferences accepted to the ICLR Workshop on “From Human Cognition to AI Reasoning: Models, Methods, and Applications”!

  • Our paper on reward learning from diverse forms of human feedback has been published on Frontiers in AI and Robotics!

Fall 2025:

  • Our paper on differential testing of autonomous systems accepted to AAAI Fall Symposium 2025!

  • Our paper on WOFOSTGym received the Outstanding Paper Award at RLC 2025!