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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.

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.

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.

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.

Kai Zeng, a computer science graduate student in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, brought home first place in the Lucid Programming Competition. Zeng competed among 260 participants from across the western United States in the hackathon. The outer space-themed challenge required contestants to solve 12 mathematic and algorithm problems such as Six Degrees of Neil Armstrong and Antimatter Annihilation.

Although he hadn’t done any algorithmic problem solving for a while, Zeng decided to enter the contest just to brush up on those skills. “I think algorithm skills should be exercised regularly,” he said. “I plan to participate in more programming competitions in the future to continue to improve my thinking and coding abilities.”

Zeng is a master’s degree student with a research focus on distributed systems and machine learning, advised by Associate Professor Lizhong Chen.

“Zeng’s excellent programming skills have helped his research significantly,” said Chen.

Jacob Cook is the definition of an overachiever. This spring he had the rare distinction of graduating with not one but two honors bachelor’s degrees from the College of Engineering at Oregon State University, in bioengineering and electrical and computer engineering, as well as a minor in computer science.

“Successful completion of a dual degree requires unparalleled dedication and discipline to meet requirements for both programs,” said Matthew Johnston, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Cook’s achievements were recognized with the Burgess/Tektronix Award, given each year by the College of Engineering to a senior who has demonstrated exceptional participation in activities beyond academic performance.

In addition to excelling in two challenging academic programs, Cook also completed a MECOP internship, participated in research for two different labs, served as both an undergraduate learning assistant and a resident assistant, and was an active community member.

“Jacob’s dedication and productive contributions to multiple hands-on research programs is remarkable, and it speaks to his future potential for contributions to the industry,” Johnston said.

Although he put in a huge amount of work on his own, Cook says he was lucky to have had tremendous support from his family.

“Both my parents are computer engineers who taught me great perseverance and an intense work ethic,” he said. “They raised me to do my best and encouraged me to go to college. Likewise, my grandfather was a businessman who taught me the importance of leadership and interpersonal skills for success. I cannot imagine where I would be without my family, and I wouldn’t have received this award without their help.”

The Burgess/Tektronix Award was initiated in 1990 to honor Fred Burgess, past dean of the College of Engineering. Cook received a plaque and a check for $500 and will be recognized at the fall College of Engineering Celebrate Excellence event in the fall.

Eta Kappa Nu at Oregon State University is an honor society for electrical and computer engineering majors through IEEE. At the end of each school year, the club recognizes two students with awards. This year winners were Yeojin Kim for the Robert Short TA of the Year award, and Noah Koontz for the Sophomore of the Year award.

Robert Short TA of the Year: Yeojin Kim

Yeojin Kim was born and grew up in Seoul, South Korea. She went to college at Sogang University where she completed a double undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering, and mathematics. She also worked as an intern for Naver, a South Korean web search engine, and as a software engineer for Qualcomm in Korea. She has served as a mentor for the Institute of International Education’s program Women Enhancing Technology to help female undergraduates studying in STEM fields.

“It is a great honor to receive this award. Sharing things I’ve learned with others during TA activities was one of the most pleasing moments,” Kim said.

Sophomore of the Year: Noah Koontz

Noah Koontz has been fascinated with the fusion of hardware and software from an early age. In middle school he got his first Arduino and attempted to build an open-source laser tag system with it.

“I’ve been a maker ever since,” he said.

At Oregon State, he has been working at the Open Sensing Lab, which has allowed him to apply his passion and skills to solve real-world problems in agriculture — building internet-connected devices for farmers and researchers to monitor their crops.

“I will continue to seize opportunities to work with embedded systems and solve real-world problems, hopefully having fun along the way,” Koontz said.

Laurel Hopkins was awarded the Future Investigators in NASA Earth and Space Science and Technology fellowship to support her doctoral research to improve species distribution models. The models link environmental variables to species occurrences and are useful tools for science and conservation.

Hopkins, a graduate student of computer science in the College of Engineering at Oregon State, was inspired by a class project in which she was modeling butterfly occurrences. She realized she could improve species distribution models using deep learning methods to analyze satellite images.

“Deep learning methods are incredibly powerful in extracting semantic information from images, meaning these techniques are well suited to analyze remotely sensed data,” she said.

She will use a large dataset of NASA Landsat images to train deep networks which, based on preliminary results, she expects will produce habitat summaries that are more descriptive than traditional methods, and lead to more informative species distribution models.

Hopkins will publicly share the image library and deep network architectures so other researchers can use them to advance ecological research.

The award is for $135,000 to support her research under the guidance of Rebecca Hutchinson, assistant professor of computer science, and of fisheries and wildlife.

“I am thrilled to be working towards better understanding how we can limit our footprint and help support biodiversity,” Hopkins said. “It is phenomenal to get this support from NASA because it means that they understand the need and importance of this area of work.”

Guest post by Travis Whitehead

Working at the Open Source Lab has been the highlight of my computer science experience at Oregon State University. It was just by chance that I came across a job listing for the OSL. I had never heard of the organization, and it certainly was not a factor in my decision to pursue computer science at Oregon State University.

I’d been running Linux as my primary operating system since high school, and over time I found myself becoming more and more deeply invested in the ideological underpinnings of FOSS (Free Open-Source Software). I appreciated the transparency of FOSS, and the benefits available through free licenses that allow anyone to use the software, change how it works, repurpose it, and distribute it.

Despite my strong interest in free software, I never imagined myself in the position of getting paid to contribute to open source. At the OSL I learned valuable skills and gained work experience, but the biggest thing to me was that I was able to do work that was ethical and important.

In a world shaped by a for-profit economy, our interaction with software and intellectual property is exclusive. If users cannot afford to pay for software, they are excluded access to the software or must access it illegally. Or worse, we become the products ourselves, subjected to all kinds of data collection and surveillance in exchange for access to services. The Open Source Lab offered me the opportunity to support open-source software projects, ultimately allowing me to contribute to The Commons, and better the world that we live in. It’s been very fulfilling for me to know that our projects create solutions that anybody and everybody may use.

Ethics aside, the work itself has provided me many opportunities to learn things that I couldn’t in the classroom. Experience with configuration management and automation tooling reshaped how I manage my personal systems at home. And I worked in a real datacenter! Tinkering with powerful hardware in a real production environment is way cooler than any academic project.

Looking forward, I hope that the Open Source Lab continues to grow and expand so that more students may have these same opportunities. The OSL is truly one of a kind, and I feel really thankful to have been able to work with the lab for the past several years.

Excitingly, this is my last term at Oregon State. I’ll be going on to work with Tag1 Consulting, where I will continue to tackle exciting infrastructure challenges and contribute back to the open-source community whenever I can.

OSU EECS News

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

Category Archives: Student Stories

Student envisions AI for safer skies, takes home prize

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

Graduate student wins top 10 nod at semiconductor research conference

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

Student wins Lucid Programming Competition

Senior wins award, recognizes family support

Honor society recognizes outstanding students

Robert Short TA of the Year: Yeojin Kim

Sophomore of the Year: Noah Koontz

Graduate student receives NASA fellowship to improve ecological models

Reflections on my time at the Open Source Lab

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