AI Portland goes to Oregon State

Megan and I have had two big hopes for AI Portland.

The first was to take our community somewhere. A real trip, out of town, all together, built around a shared experience with AI. The second was to see robots. Every once in a while you’ll spot a robot dog at an event, but we wanted to see robots in action, up close, and learn about the role AI plays in making them work.

On October 9, both happened in one day.

Getting there

Lucky for us, we have friends at Oregon State University. Burt Rosen, director of marketing innovations at OSU, took our idea and ran with it, connecting us with the right people and helping build a field trip around our community.

The day started the way any good field trip should: on an actual yellow school bus. We leaned all the way in, complete with brown bag snack sacks and roll call, and headed south to Corvallis.

Our OSU coordinators, Rachel Robertson (content maketing strategist) and Shelly Signs (senior event marketing strategist), welcomed us to Owen Hall on a crisp fall morning. Kagan Tumer, director of OSU’s Collaborative Robotics and Intelligent Systems Institute, kicked off the day, and then we split into small groups for the walk over to Graf Hall.

And what a walk. OSU’s campus is beautiful: tree-lined paths, classic brick buildings, and fall in full color. More than one of us said some version of “this makes me want to go back to school.”

First, slugs

My group started with Jing Zhou, a precision agriculture specialist in OSU’s Department of Crop and Soil Science, which is how I learned more than I ever expected to about slugs.

Slugs are a major cause of lost seed yield for Oregon growers. They mostly come out at night, and pesticides only work when they’re active. So Jing’s team uses AI, cameras, and weather sensors in the field to count and track them, which tells growers when to act instead of guessing. Gross, and genuinely fascinating.

Bonus fact I picked up along the way: Oregon grows nearly all of the country’s hazelnuts. About 99% of them. I had no idea.

Then, robots

Next up was the robotics lab in Graf Hall, and this is where the second dream came true. We saw real robots in action, up close: humanoids walking the lab floor, a wheeled robot hauling boxes, and robotic arms ready to grab.

Alan Fern and his team walked us through the Dynamic Robotics Laboratory, the lab where Agility Robotics got its start. His work focuses on AI that lets humanoid robots do real-world work. The big takeaway: the hardware is impressive, but the hard part is making robots smart, and that’s where AI comes in

Lunch and a call to action

Over lunch, we heard from a panel of OSU folks on building meaningful partnerships between industry and the university. The main takeaway was news to me: OSU works closely with businesses and companies here in Oregon. If you work at an Oregon company, or know people who do, OSU is a resource. I’m not sure I knew that before, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

Blueberries?!

After lunch, we hopped back on the bus to Richardson Hall for one more round. I joined a session with Wei Yang, an OSU horticulture professor who leads Oregon’s blueberry extension program.

Who knew that, one, blueberry specialization is a thing, and two, we’re using AI to reliably produce delicious blueberries? What?!

Turns out it’s a big deal here. His team is working on machines that can harvest fresh-market blueberries, robots that use UV light to fight plant disease, and even an AI assistant to help Pacific Northwest growers answer production questions. Slugs in the morning, blueberries in the afternoon, robots everywhere in between.

Then we grabbed more snacks, climbed back on the bus, and headed home.

Meanwhile, in the other groups

Groups rotated all day, so nobody saw everything. Here’s what the rest of our crew got to experience:

• Sandhya Saisubramanian shared her lab’s work on safe and reliable autonomy, which is about making sure robots make good decisions on their own.
• Fuxin Li talked computer vision: how machines see and understand the world in 3D, including systems that help robots pick up and move objects.
• Luyao Ma showed how AI and smart sensors can make food safer, from detecting harmful bacteria to tracking food quality.
• Heesung Woo brought robotics and sensors to forestry in the afternoon session.

If you were in one of those groups, we’d love to hear what stuck with you.

Thank you

To everyone at OSU: every single person made us feel welcome. We felt special, we learned a ton, and we had a great time. Thank you to Burt, Rachel, and Shelly for making this happen and wrangling our groups all day, and to Kagan Tumer; Forrest Masters, Kearney Dean of Engineering; Shawn Donkin, Associate Dean for Research in the College of Agricultural Sciences; our panelists; and every researcher who walked us through their work.

And a special thanks to our bus driver. She was amazing. We may have had a run-in with the police… she handled it like a pro and got us home safe.