OSU EECS News « News from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University

Air travel can be made safer with artificial intelligence guarding against human error. That’s the vision of Andrew Dassonville, an engineering senior at Oregon State University, who recently took second place in a national airport design competition.

Human error is the leading cause of commercial airline crashes and general aviation accidents, according to the Federal Aviation Administration. Dassonville, who studies computer science and robotics, zeroed in on radio communications as one source of human error where AI can provide a critical safety check.

Dassonville was awarded second place in the runway safety category at the 2022 ACRP University Design Competition, which challenges students to create innovative solutions for issues facing airports and the National Airspace System. The competition is sponsored by the Airport Cooperative Research Program, part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Transportation Research Board.

In Dassonville’s design, an artificial intelligence-based system constantly “listens in” on radio exchanges between pilots and air traffic controllers, looking for discrepancies in communication, such as readback errors. Suppose, for example, a controller instructs aircraft ABC to climb and maintain 8,000 feet, but the pilot reads back 9,000 feet. The eavesdropping AI would catch the error and avert potential disaster.

“This system is capable of identifying that discrepancy and would alert the controller that the aircraft might not be doing what they’re expecting,” Dassonville said.

Dassonville, an avid pilot who discovered his passion for flying though the Oregon State Flying Club, saw the competition as a perfect overlap of his interests in aviation and computer science.

“As a pilot, safety is always on your mind, and you’re taking on some risk whenever you take off,” Dassonville said. “Being able to use my skills that I’ve learned at Oregon State through computer science in order to help mitigate risks in aviation is pretty cool.”

Kiri Wagstaff, associate research professor of computer science at Oregon State, advised Dassonville on the project.

“Andrew is an outstanding student and pilot,” Wagstaff said. “As a pilot myself, I’m very excited about Andrew’s concept, and I have thoroughly enjoyed discussing AI, flying adventures, and flight training with him.”

After graduating, Dassonville plans on a career that involves aviation.

“I’d love a career that combines computer science, robotics, and aviation,” he said. “It could be something that involves self-flying planes, autopilot technologies, or aviation instruments.”

Some of the reasons Andrew Dassonville loves being a pilot.

Gabor Temes and wife Ibi — Gabor Temes and his wife Ibi accept his lifetime achievement award at the ISCAS Conference in Austin, Texas. Photo (c) 2022 Lucero Valle Archuleta. www.lucerocreativestudio.com.

Gabor Temes, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, received the IEEE International Circuits and Systems Society’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his “contributions to delta-sigma converters, analog filters and signal processing, and engineering education.”

His work has improved technologies like cellphones and medical devices, and his mentorship of more than 100 students has multiplied the impact of his work.

Among his many awards, Temes received the nation’s highest professional distinction for engineers in 2015, when he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. He was also named a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors in 2020.

Temes earned his undergraduate degrees at the Technical University and Eotvos University in Budapest, Hungary, from 1948 to 1956, and his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Ottawa, Canada, in 1961.

Prior to arriving at Oregon State in 1990, he held academic positions at the Technical University of Budapest, Stanford University, and UCLA. He also worked in industry at Northern Electric R&D Laboratories (now Bell-Northern Research) and Ampex Corp.

“Any achievements of mine are largely thanks to the excellence of my students and the support I received from my school and industry over many years,” Temes said upon receiving the award at the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

Learn more about Temes in “An Interview with Professor Gabor C. Temes” in the IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine.

For the 15th year in a row, Pacific Power has awarded a grant to Oregon State University for engineering scholarships. To date, more than 100 students have received Pacific Power scholarships, which help future engineers obtain their degrees, especially in electrical and computer engineering.

“We believe in the power of education to create a lifetime of opportunity,” said Stefan Bird, president and CEO of Pacific Power, in an article about the company’s latest round of grants.

Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate head for graduate programs in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, has seen how the scholarships provide benefits for his students.

He regularly takes his classes on field trips to learn about the power system equipment at Pacific Power facilities, where employees, including some Oregon State alumni, show students how the equipment operates.

“Our courses in power and energy systems provide a strong foundation to tackle problems that electrical and computer engineering graduates will encounter in the utilities industry,” Cotilla-Sanchez said. “Partners like Pacific Power are instrumental in translating the application of, for example, power system protection concepts, by facilitating co-curricular activities.”

Jeffrey Chu, a postbaccalaureate computer science student at Oregon State University, had a perfectly fine career as an attorney. After earning a law degree in 2016 from the University of Texas at Austin, Chu worked first as a felony prosecutor, then as a civil litigator.

He liked his job but came to realize that it wasn’t his passion.

Outside the courtroom, Chu’s time was occupied not only with preparing his cases, but also with a ton of monotonous data entry tasks.

“The worst was tracking billing hours,” he said. “I had to keep track of what I was doing every six minutes.”

Chu, who lives in Houston, was working every weekend and didn’t get many days off. In order to make better use of his time, he decided to teach himself to automate some of the mundane tasks. That’s when he fell in love with programming.

Around the same time, one of Chu’s friends completed a six-month coding boot camp and told him about job offers he had received, which motivated Chu even more to make a career switch. Though he could have chosen to attend a boot camp, Chu researched his options and decided he needed a computer science degree.

“I thought the best opportunity for me was to pursue a CS degree, to get a strong foundation and give myself more time to absorb the concepts,” he said.

The degree and the foundation, Chu believed, would help him develop a career as a software engineer, not just a coder. He also realized that a computer science program would give him the opportunity to pursue internships, which would in turn give him an advantage in obtaining a full-time job.

Making an informed decision

Chu dove in to researching online computer science programs.

“One thing you learn in law school is the ability to look for things and do it efficiently,” he said. “So I was pretty confident in my ability to make an informed decision after I did all my research.”

Chu liked Oregon State’s program because he wouldn’t have to take, or retake, core curriculum classes. He could dive in to computer science classes right away. He also perused LinkedIn and found that Oregon State alumni had jobs everywhere: big tech companies, small companies, and startups.

What really convinced him to choose Oregon State was the online community he found in the student-led Slack channel, where anyone can ask questions and many will share their perspectives. Students and alumni constantly interact over a wide range of topics — including classes, interviews, career choices, and professional development opportunities.

“There were great reviews about the program there,” Chu said. “And people were so helpful, building each other up and giving advice. Other programs I looked at didn’t have that sense of community.”

A funny thing happened on the way to a degree

Though Chu quit his job as an attorney to become a full-time student in 2020, he landed a full-time cybersecurity job in 2021, while still pursuing his computer science degree. Chu thought cybersecurity would be an interesting path, and a friend connected him with another friend who worked in the field, who ultimately offered him a job.

Chu has since decided that cybersecurity isn’t the field for him. He anticipates graduating in December 2022, two years after beginning the program. In the meantime, he recently finished an internship at Amazon in Washington, D.C., and is currently on a second internship at Ford in Dearborn, Michigan.

“I’m the type of person who just likes to try multiple things and see what sticks,” he said.

Jeffrey Chu’s interview tips for career-changers

Even before he started the online postbaccalaureate program in computer science, Jeffrey Chu was a fan of the student-led Slack community. During his time at Oregon State University, Chu has been an active participant in the channel, including the following, his contribution to a recent discussion about getting through a technical interview.

To give you some perspective and to contrast with some stories here, my very first tech interview went well and I got an offer for an internship after. My first year at OSU I had major imposter syndrome and didn’t apply to any internships so I was pretty stressed going into this year’s internship recruiting season as it will be my final one (hopefully). I think I owe my success to mostly luck, but there are some things I did to reduce uncertainties.

Get familiar with the interview process.
- Essentially, know how the interview will go. (Will it be purely behavioral? Two tech questions, one behavioral? Only tech questions?)
- There are a lot of anecdotes from people who have interviewed with some companies in the past if you do some research online.
Reach out to people you may know who work for the company.
- Being older, leverage the professional network you have already built.
- Even if that person doesn’t work in a tech role, they can probably put you in touch with someone who does to get some insight into how the interview may go or what it’s like working there.
Do Pramp/mock behavioral AND technical interviews.
- Practice doing LC-style questions while speaking out loud while someone watches over you and judges you. When I did my first mock tech interview I floundered on an easy merge intervals question just because I wasn’t used to the pressure.
- Behavioral wise, practicing the STAR method out loud is much more difficult than in your head.
It’s not always about getting the right/optimal answer on tech questions.
- Interviewers want to see your thought process, how you bounce back from setbacks, and how you take direction.
- Sometimes you have to get the right answer though.

Students in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, along with their family and friends, commemorated their graduation during the school’s graduation celebration on June 10, 2022.

“Our last in-person celebration was in 2019, so it was great to see how happy everyone was to watch the students walk across the stage and be recognized for their achievements,” said Gaulke Professor and School Head Tom Weller.

Oregon State University alumna Nadia Payet, who earned a Ph.D. in computer science in 2011 and is the Senior Engineering Manager for Navigation on Google Maps, shared words of wisdom for the graduates.

After losing her younger sister to cancer in 2017, Payet changed her outlook on life and offered three lessons:

Nadia Payet delivers her speech to the graduates — Alumna Nadia Payet delivered the keynote speech at the 2022 EECS graduation celebration. Watch the entire event on YouTube.

Figure out what you want. It’s not what your parents or society wants for you. After her sister died, Payet shifted her focus from solely building a career to building more meaningful relationships. “I still love the successful career,” she said. “Because I listen more carefully now, I’m just a more human leader; someone who truly cares and puts her people first.”

Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can do today. She urged the graduates to pretend they don’t have all the time in the world to get things done. “I remind myself that we don’t have forever, so let’s make today count,” Payet said.

Lead with empathy and kindness. “Leadership is taking care of yourself, and empowering others to do the same,” she said, and advised the audience to practice gratitude as a path toward leading with empathy and kindness.

The graduation celebration also recognized faculty, staff, and students with awards.

Outstanding Staff Member of the Year
Awarded to Calvin Hughes, assistant director for graduate programs, this honor is given to an individual who goes above and beyond their duties to help students. They always have an open door for questions, even with work sprawled across their desk.

Innovative Teaching Award
This award is presented to a faculty member who brings a new edge to the classroom. These individuals make learning fun and help enhance students’ understanding of the material through new techniques. Instructor Rob Hess received the award for computer science. Professor David Allstot and Senior Instructor Roger Traylor both received the award for electrical and computer engineering.

Faculty of the Year
Computer science professor Mike Bailey received this award which is given to a faculty member who inspires students both inside the classroom and out. The passion and pride they take in their teaching and their subject matter is evident in everything they do.

Sophomore of the Year
Julian Henry was the recipient of this award from Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society for electrical and computer engineering students.

Undergraduate Learning Assistants of the Year
Computer science students James Taylor and Andrew Kamand took home these honors. Taylor, who was among the 2022 graduates, was a learning assistant for multiple classes. Kamand, an online postbaccalaureate student in computer science, served as a learning assistant for an Introduction to Databases course.

EECS Outstanding Dissertation Award
Shashini De Silva, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering, received this award for her thesis, “Secure Data Analytics under Data Integrity Attacks.” De Silva was advised by Assistant Professor Jinsub Kim.

Robert Short Graduate Teaching Assistant of the Year
This award, established in honor of Robert Short, was a professor of electrical engineering and the founding chairman of the computer science department, to encourage students to consider a career in academia. Shane Allen, a master’s degree student in electrical and computer engineering, was the recipient of the award.

Dmytro Shabanov and Harry Herzberg — Oregon State University students Dmytro Shabanov (left) and Harry Herzberg are working on a startup company to help students get better grades.

Two Oregon State University students are winning entrepreneurship awards as part of the team developing Alerty, a mobile app to help students — especially those with ADHD — perform better in class.

Most recently, the team won the Social Entrepreneurship Award at the TiE University Global Pitch Competition and was one of 30 teams to advance to the semifinal round, out of some 1,400 accepted into the competition.

Harry Herzberg, a senior in computer science, and Dmytro Shabanov, a senior in finance and marketing, are joined on the Alerty team by their business partners Jade Zavsklavsky, Artemis Kearny, Nicholas Craycraft, Alexander Victoria Trujillo, and Freya Crowe.

The Alerty app transcribes class lectures in real time to help students not only to review content, but also to see what they might have just missed.

Herzberg explained that students with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder may unintentionally lose focus in class and — because college courses are often fast-paced, with information that builds upon itself — quickly get left behind.

“I’ve had many classes where I’ve missed the teacher talking about the homework assignment, or a key point,” said Herzberg, who has ADHD. “Then I’m spending the entire day or even weeks trying to catch up, just because I missed that one important point.”

Herzberg got the idea for Alerty when he was in high school. His sister worked as a paraeducator who assisted students with learning disabilities by sitting with them in class, giving them one-on-one support.

“I wanted to make something that people would want to use as a tool, without drawing attention to themselves,” Herzberg said.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when classes were being taught asynchronously online, Herzberg liked that he was able to go back and replay the lectures and absorb concepts he may have missed in real time.

“I was able to get better grades and even made the Dean’s List because I was able to go back and replay, slow down, and speed up the videos,” he said.

Alerty is a two-way street. The instructor must use the app in order for students to use it themselves. When the instructor makes an important point, they press a button on the app, which alerts students with a vibration on their phones or tablets. The app also highlights the corresponding part of the transcript in blue.

After class, students can review the lecture and, if necessary, select a portion of the transcript to ask the instructor for clarification. This feature also helps instructors to see where students are struggling over certain concepts.

The app can help many other students as well, including those who have different learning styles, English language learners, and those who have difficulty hearing.

In addition to the TiE award, Alerty earned second place in the College of Business’s Launch Academy competition, and a grant from the 1517 Fund.

Shabanov, who is responsible for the company’s business strategy, marketing, and financial planning, is working on obtaining additional funding.

Mike Bailey, professor of computer science, beta-tested Alerty in one of his classes during spring term. “For those who have difficulty focusing and taking notes in class, I think this could be a game-changer,” he said.

Watch a demonstration of the Alerty app.

Photo of Margaret Burnett Margaret Burnett, Distinguished Professor of computer science at Oregon State University, is the recipient of the 2022 IEEE Computer Society’s TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Leadership Award. She is being honored for her decades of work breaking glass ceilings for women in computing and software engineering.

Burnett was nominated for the award by Amy J. Ko, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington and, as an undergraduate research assistant and computer science student at Oregon State University, was mentored by Burnett.

“She is the single and sole reason that I discovered research, and the fact that she was a woman in CS made me feel included in a department and field that was mostly men,” Ko wrote in her nomination letter.

Moreover, Ko noted that Burnett continued to mentor her throughout graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University and into her pre-tenure career.

“She is the single most important professional mentor in my life — and as someone who now mentors many, she makes it look incredibly easy,” Ko said.

In addition, Ko praised Burnett for her contributions to the field, including her work to incorporate diversity into many aspects computer science.

Burnett pioneered the field of end-user software engineering, which helps people who are not professional developers create better software. She is also the creator the GenderMag Method, which aims to make software that is usable for everyone, regardless of gender.

“I feel incredibly honored to be joining the ranks of the extraordinary software engineering researchers who have won this award in past years,” Burnett said.

About Margaret Burnett

The year 2022 marks the 51st year that Burnett has been breaking glass ceilings for women in computing and software engineering. She began her career in 1971 as the first woman software engineer ever hired at Procter & Gamble’s 13,000-employee Ivorydale complex. After a few years in industry, she became the second woman to earn a computer science Ph.D. from University of Kansas, and then became one of two women who were the first to be hired as tenure-track computer science faculty members at Oregon State University. In recognition of the career, Burnett broke another glass ceiling in 2016 when she became the first woman in computer science and in the College of Engineering to be named an OSU Distinguished Professor.

At OSU, Burnett was the first faculty member to do computer science research mentoring for undergraduate students. In her 30-year stretch of mentoring undergraduate and high school students in software engineering and human-computer interaction, over half of whom have been members of underrepresented groups. At least half of her graduate students are also members of underrepresented groups. Her students have achieved extraordinary levels of success, receiving national awards and fellowships from NSF, CRA, NCWIT, NASA, Google, Adobe, and others. In recognition of these successes, Burnett has been recognized with mentoring awards from OSU, NCWIT, CRA, and Microsoft.

Burnett’s work pioneered investigating gender-inclusion bugs in “gender-neutral” software. When she initiated this research in the early 2000s, gender differences in computing workplace and education environments had become recognized, but investigations into software itself considered only gender-specific software, such as video games for girls. Burnett and her team systematically debunked misconceptions of gender neutrality in user-facing software applications from spreadsheets to programming environments. After building the research foundations, Burnett and her team then created the GenderMag software inspection method, which pinpoints subtle gender biases in user-facing software features. GenderMag is now in use by technologists in over 45 countries to improve their products’ equity and inclusion.

Burnett’s seminal research contributions include multiple additional outside-the-box contributions to software engineering that have started entirely new subareas. For example:

Visual programming: For her early contributions to scaling up and supporting abstraction in visual programming, she was a recipient of the prestigious National Science Foundation’s Young Investigator award in 1994.
End-user software engineering: She was the founding project director (2003-2009) for the EUSES (End Users Shaping Effective Software) Consortium, a multi-institution collaboration among OSU and Carnegie Mellon University, University of Washington, University of Nebraska, Drexel University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Cambridge, and IBM. Under her leadership, the EUSES Consortium won 10 best paper awards and honorable mentions, and spawned the subarea now known as end-user software engineering.
XAI: She produced seminal work on “end-user debugging” of AI agents (papers in 2007-2015). These early papers, especially the 2015 one, greatly influenced the DARPA Explainable AI (XAI) program, which in turn spawned the now-exploding explainable AI subarea.
Spreadsheets: Her seminal work on spreadsheets led to a collaboration with Microsoft that eventually produced new end-user programming features in Excel, impacting millions of users.

Siddarth Rai Mahendra, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, was honored with a Top 10 Presenter Award at the Semiconductor Research Corporation’s TECHCON 2021 conference. The conference showcases cutting-edge research being conducted in areas that will shape semiconductor technology over the next decade.

Mahendra’s presentation, “A Compact and Broadband On-Chip Delay Line Design Based on the Bridged T-Coil,” was selected from over 150 student presentations.

Mahendra, who is an SRC Research Scholar, is advised by Professor Andreas Weisshaar. His research is sponsored by SRC through the Center for Design of Analog-Digital Integrated Circuits.

Mahendra earned a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication engineering from DA-IICT in India, and a master’ degree in integrated circuit design from National Taipei University in Taiwan. Before coming to Oregon State, he worked as an IC design engineer in Taiwan and in IIT Bombay, India.

SRC is the world’s leading non-profit industry-government-academia microelectronics research consortium funding academic research tasks selected and directed by industry and government members.

Jonah Siekmann and Yesh Godse A research paper on robotics authored by computer science researchers at Oregon State University was recently named one of the top four out of more than 2,000 accepted submissions at a prestigious conference.

Students Jonah Siekmann and Yesh Godse presented their research findings at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. In their paper, “Sim-to-Real Learning of All Common Bipedal Gaits via Periodic Reward Composition,” they report on their work using simulations to teach two-legged robots how to run, skip, and hop.

The paper is co-authored with Alan Fern, professor and associate head of research in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and Jonathan Hurst, professor of mechanical engineering and robotics.

Traditionally, researchers have tried to train bipedal robots to move by first creating a “reference trajectory,” which tells the robot at each moment where its joints and velocities should be. This approach, however, doesn’t work particularly well since it is difficult to figure out the reference trajectories, and it doesn’t take into account the uneven surfaces the robot needs to deal with.

Instead, the researchers’ new approach trains the robot in simulation, and rewards the robot when it is accomplishing the goal, and gives negative rewards when it is not.

“We use an approach that simply specifies constraints on the foot forces and velocities which allows us to specify the different types of gaits and smoothly move between them,” Fern said. “This worked much better than we ever expected.”

Siekmann, a master’s degree student in robotics who earned an honors bachelor’s degree in computer science from Oregon State in 2020, provided some additional insights.

“We were trying to train a neural network to learn various bipedal behaviors from scratch without any kind of motion capture or reference to what those behaviors looked like,” Siekmann explained. “To do this, we used deep reinforcement learning that allows a neural network to maximize a reward function.”

Added Godse, “It turned out that there was a simple mathematical framework for describing the full spectrum of all bipedal gaits and their corresponding reward/cost functions.”

Godse graduated in just three years with a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Oregon State in spring 2021 and began working on robotics research as a freshman.

Both Siekmann and Godse are now working as controls engineers at Agility Robotics, the company co-founded by Hurst that develops the robots used in Oregon State’s Dynamic Robotics Lab.

Victor Agostinelli, a doctoral student in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, has been selected for the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory – Oregon State University Distinguished Graduate Research Program.

The goal of the program is to “strengthen and grow research collaborations and develop a select cohort of doctoral students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.” Only 20 students whose research aligns with the U.S. Department of Energy’s mission are chosen for the program each year.

Agostinelli, who is advised by Lizhong Chen, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering, works on research to optimize and automate the placement of machine learning accelerators on integrated circuits. Agostinelli’s research specifically focuses on optimizing the selection of dataflows.

“The multi-year funding allows Victor to pursue his passion in exploring the application of machine learning in computer architecture,” said Chen. “I look forward to the collaborative research that will strengthen the relationship between OSU and PNNL.”

Through the program, Agostinelli will be appointed to an assistantship at Oregon State University for two years and will then continue his research on a fellowship at PNNL for the next two years. There, he will work with a PNNL mentor while continuing to be advised by Chen.

Agostinelli, a native of Portland, Ore., earned a B.S. in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, where he participated in research on robotic swarms in Professor Julie A. Adams’ Human-Machine Teaming Lab.

“Truly, the chance to collaborate with researchers at PNNL is priceless,” Agostinelli said. “I am incredibly excited to explore the bleeding edge of accelerator design and design optimization and automation.”

OSU EECS News

News from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University

Student envisions AI for safer skies, takes home prize

Temes honored for lifetime achievement

Pacific Power continues longstanding support for engineering students

Breaking free, with a CS degree

Making an informed decision

A funny thing happened on the way to a degree

Jeffrey Chu’s interview tips for career-changers

Electrical engineering and computer science students celebrate their graduation

Professor receives award from world’s largest technical professional organization for computer science

Graduate student wins top 10 nod at semiconductor research conference

Computer science students’ paper selected as one of conference’s best

Graduate student selected for national lab program

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