Jose Aguilar is not here to help robots take over the world. In fact, the first year PhD student studying artificial intelligence says he’s actually working on the opposite–to ensure that AI systems are safe, and raise alarm when they’re not.
Aguilar’s research focuses on the theoretical and applied aspects of safe AI. In the theoretical realm, he tries to ensure probabilistically that a model is going to be safe. When that algorithm or model is used in a situation–like autonomous vehicles, for example–his work moves over to the application side.
And we really need safe AI! Listen to Selene and Jenna’s conversation with Jose to learn more about safe artificial intelligence and how Jose’s background of growing up in Mexico and moving to Oklahoma brought him to OSU.
Natalie Van Gelder wants to teach writing, but not necessarily to people who want to write.
The first-year MFA student in creative nonfiction recognizes writing as a tool for discovery–particularly as an exploration of self-discovery, and especially when it comes to better understanding neurodivergence.
Natalie’s writing contributes to the work of medical humanities and narrative medicine, both emerging fields that explore the humanities as tools for increasing empathy in medicine. Narrative medicine likewise recognizes the all-too-common disconnect between practitioners and their clients, and aims to incorporate storytelling into the practitioner-patient relationship. That might look like practitioners spending more time with patients, or asking them to write about family histories before asking about symptoms, knowing that through a thorough understanding of a patients’ background, more helpful information about their current conditions may emerge.
After graduating from California State University Bakersfield in 2008 with a degree in literature, Natalie worked in technical publications at NASA. She’s always loved science (and says if she wasn’t a writer she would be an entomologist) but it wasn’t until her MA program in creative writing at California State University Northridge that Natalie realized writing could be a tool of discovery and could help her better understand her own diagnoses.
Her graduate thesis “Desert Anxieties” was a hybrid work that explored her own neurodivergence. The paper was written in IEEE, a format commonly used for scientific publications. By using this style typically reserved for detached scientific observation, Natalie put herself as the work’s case study, interrogating the distanced treatment she typically received from doctors and psychiatrists.
Now, Natalie’s work continues to explore trauma studies and disability, especially neurodivergence as it presents as ADHD and autism. As a neurodivergent writer, Natalie is well aware of the power of writing as a way of interacting and making sense of the world. It’s a powerful tool that she wants to teach to people who may not be familiar with the practice.
“WIth Open Arms” (a photograph from Natalie’s MA thesis)
Currently, Natalie teaches WR 121, an introductory composition course that is typically populated by mostly STEM majors–and she loves it. While still only in the first term of her two-year program, Natalie hopes to work in the medical field after graduating, teaching writing to mental health practitioners and therapists, giving them resources to pass on to their clients about the power of writing as a tool for self-discovery.
Tune in Sunday 12/03 to hear Natalie talk about all this and more on KBVR 88.7, or catch the episode later on our podcast.
Trophic ecology studies how energy flows through food webs; basically who is eating whom in an ecosystem. Understanding the structure of feeding relationships among species in a system helps us to understand why populations may fluctuate in terms of abundance or distribution at different times. These dynamics are particularly important to consider in the face of a changing climate as conditions like increasing temperatures make resources less predictable. Our guest this week is Luke Bobay, who is trying to do exactly this for anchovy in the Pacific Ocean off the US West Coast.
Luke, a 3rd year PhD student in Integrative Biology, is researching the potential influences of climate change on anchovy abundance by studying its ecological effects on their early life stages. Anchovy are forage fish, which means they are eaten (aka foraged upon) by a lot of larger animals such as birds, marine mammals, other predatory fish, and humans. They are also short-lived and therefore we expect their population dynamics to respond pretty quickly to things that are happening in the environment.
For his research, Luke is looking at the larval stage of anchovy. He uses samples and plankton imagery data collected on weeks-long research cruises that Plankton Ecology Lab has conducted during the past six years, as well as samples collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) since 1996. The samples that Luke uses are collected using large nets with a very fine mesh that enables the collection of tiny plankton. The imagery data are collected using a sampling technology unique to Luke’s lab called the In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS). ISIIS uses a high-resolution camera to take images of the water column at a very high spatial and temporal scale, allowing the lab to basically take one long continuous image of what’s happening in the top 100 m of the ocean. These images are then run through an AI image classification model that automatically identifies and measures each individual plankter that is recorded. Both the net and the ISIIS also record data about the environment, such as temperature, salinity, and depth. By examining relationships between environmental conditions, the abundance of other plankton, and the abundance and other characteristics of anchovy larvae, Luke explores the factors that may contribute to variability in anchovy abundance.
In Situ Ichthyoplankton Imaging System (ISIIS)
To hear more about the day in the life of an anchovy, as well as Luke’s journey from OSU to another OSU, tune in this Sunday, November 5th live on 88.7 FM or on the live stream . Missed the show? You can listen to the recorded episode on your preferred podcast platform!
You don’t have to look hard to find signs of the long legacy of logging in Oregon. It’s evident in everything from the names of local sports teams and businesses to the clear cutting spread across nearby hills.
But in Maxville, nestled in Wallowa County in eastern Oregon, there’s a story that often goes untold. Like many Oregon towns, Maxville was a timber town, but unique to Maxville is the community of Black loggers that lived and worked there after the Great Migration of the 1920s.
Maxville Logger Company Photo, circa 1926 (Photo courtesy of the Maxville Heritage Interpretive Center, Timber Culture Photos)
Lonni Ivey is a logger’s daughter. In her family logging goes back several generations on both sides. After graduating from OSU with a BA in Philosophy & Religious Studies, she fell in love with history and religious history, specifically that of the American West. While in her MA program in History, she learned about the community of Black loggers in Maxville and immediately knew she had to learn more.
Lonni devoted her research to discovering more about Maxville and giving this story the attention it deserves, leading to her capstone project “More Than a Footnote: Erasure, Exclusion, and the Remarkable Presence of the Black Logging Community of Maxville, Oregon, 1923-33.” Lonni was inspired by Gwendolyn Trice, the founder and executive director of the Maxville Heritage Ideology Center and herself the descendant of one of the Maxville Loggers.
At a time when Oregon’s constitution included laws excluding Black people from the state, the mere presence of a community like Maxville was remarkable, let alone their perseverance and persistence to thrive in such a racially hostile environment. Recruited by the Bowman-Hicks Lumber Company, these experienced loggers traveled in boxcars to Wallowa County all the way from states like Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and Arkansas. Eventually, their families began to join them, and this influx of people proved to be a major economic boom for Wallowa County. Maxville had a Black baseball team, a post office, hotel, and the first segregated school in Oregon’s history.
As a white historian researching a community of color, and one that has been erased and excluded for generations, it was important to Lonni to acknowledge that this research requires relationship building and that communities of color have the right to deny access to historical records to external researchers. In Lonni’s work she seeks to platform Black contributions to Oregon history and address racial inequalities and racism. Lonni’s own family’s history is one of racism and white supremacy, and she views her work not as redeeming her family (whom she no longer has contact with) but instead as reparative action to address the harm that racism has enacted in this state.
As a non-traditional and disabled student, advocacy and allyship is central to Lonni’s work. She graduated in June 2023, presenting her project at the 100th anniversary commemoration of Maxville. She hopes to work as an advocate for minorized communities and to get grant funding for further research and digitization of the archive at the Wallowa County Museum.
Tune in Sunday, August 20th at 7pm on KBVR 88.7 to hear more!
Maxville today. Photo taken by L. Ivey June 2, 2023
There’s a big difference between human time and Earth–or soil–time. It’s what makes climate impacts so difficult to imagine, and climate solutions so challenging to fully realize. Take it from someone who knows: Adrian Gallo has spent the last decade studying the very idea of “permanence.”
It took an entire day to dig a 1x1x1 meter perfectly square soil pit in the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest outside of Eugene, Oregon. It’s a terribly cumbersome process, but you get much better data from this sampling method compared the conventional methods and the photos are better.
Adrian has dug through a lot of dirt. As a recent PhD graduate in soil science, his research focused on the carbon sequestration potentials of soil. Soil holds about twice as much carbon as our atmosphere. If you factor in permafrost (frozen soils in cold regions that are rapidly thawing) then soil holds nearly three times more carbon than both the atmosphere and all vegetation combined. And that’s a lot.
Let’s back up a second for a quick carbon cycle overview: plants use CO2 to produce sugars through photosynthesis. Microbes eat these sugars, inhaling oxygen and respiring CO2, and when plants and soil decay, they release carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. There’s a delicate balance between soil being a carbon sink (absorbing more carbon than it releases) or a carbon source (the opposite). More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere = more greenhouse gasses; more climate uncertainty.
Some of Adrian’s soil samples included sites in Alaska where the ground is permanently frozen year around, leading to pockets of frozen water, leading to the presence of an “ice wedge” seen here. In order to preserve the integrity (physical, chemical, and biological) of these unique soils, sampling and processing had to occur in a walk in freezer.
Soil’s a tricky thing to study. The age of carbon stored in soil ranges widely. Some plant-derived carbon enters the soil and cycles back into the atmosphere in a number of hours, but other soil carbon can remain underground for thousands of years. And around 12,000 years ago (right around the end of the last ice age) soils used to hold nearly 10% more organic carbon than they do now. Most of that carbon loss came along with the spread of industrial agriculture in the last 200 years. If we could regain some of that carbon storage capacity, we’d have a powerful natural climate solution.
Adrian examined soil cores from nearly 40 representative ecosystems across North America. Adrian’s research was unique in not only its depth (at below 30 cm they tested beyond most existing soil research) but also its length (part of a 30 year project).
The findings? First, soil can indeed be a natural climate solution, but only if farmers can be convinced to alter their land management practices in perpetuity. Many land management practices to prevent carbon escape have been largely the same since the Dust Bowl (minimize tilling, plant natural windbreaks, cover crops, etc) but the expense has not made the switch financially worthwhile. To incentivize farmers, the emerging carbon market allows farm managers to get paid for the carbon they store by selling credits to large companies wanting to offset their emissions. It’s an interesting idea, but also plagued with problems. Big corporations are eager to market themselves as more climate friendly, which often leads to greenwashing. But more importantly, there’s a big question over how long this carbon needs to stay in the soil in order for it to count as a credit. It’s easier to motivate a farmer to alter their land management for 30 years–but that’s thinking in human time, not soil time, and that shortsightedness has some dire consequences, even if moving in the right direction. Now try convincing farmers to use these practices for 100 years–still not on the same scale as soil, but certainly getting closer, and an even tougher sell.
Second, much to Adrian’s and the other researchers’ surprise, there seemed to be a homogenizing effect in endmembers of the soil. No matter what plant types grew aboveground, the distribution of plant-end-members was largely the same, from grasslands to mountain ranges. Adrian coined this term “ecosystem inertia” and it’s still not known why exactly this happens.
