Spring2025 39 ZGF make that prediction that you’ve observed and then test your hypothesis against more experimentation. Go through that loop over and over again. That’s called the software development method. ¶ Instead of doing it that way, why not just give the computer as many examples as you could and let it go figure out what the program is by itself? Let it write the program. Let the computer observe all of this mountain of data and find the patterns of relationships within the data, to extract, if you will, the defining features by itself, the predictive features by itself, and then write the program. ¶ That is the gigantic breakthrough. And what I just described is the foundational technology called machine learning, which led to deep learning, which led to the breakthroughs that we know of today called artificial intelligence. That’s the “so what.” ¶ When something of great value, something that’s hard to do, becomes a million times or a billion times or a trillion times faster or cheaper, how would that change behavior? We observed that it was going to change the industry completely, that software programing would be revolutionized, that the type of software we could write, unimaginable in the past, we would do on a routine basis now and a whole bunch of new applications would be created. ¶ An example is applying artificial intelligence to one of the largest multi-physics problems: climate science. Or an incredibly tough problem for computers — easy for us, but a tough problem for computers — the articulation and manipulation of things, which is called robotics. ¶ These types of problems are now within the practical imagination of developers around the world. That’s the “so what.” FESER: President Murthy, how would you respond from a higher education and Oregon State University standpoint? MURTHY: If you look at the problems facing the universe or the world — the climate crisis is such a big part of it — our ability to handle big datasets give us tools that we’ve never had before. And this is particularly relevant for OSU: big on oceanography, on forests, on agriculture. AI gives us tools to address these problems, to create new models, to predict the future, to control the future. That’s a huge, big deal.¶ Enabling our graduates to be able to use these tools to address climate science, to address biotech, to address human health, to address robotics — that’s the big “so what” for me. Just expanding the possibilities of the problems that we can solve and enabling our students to address these big problems. 4. STARTING IN 2026, OREGON STATE WILL HOST ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL UNIVERSITY SUPERCOMPUTERS IN THE NATION. ODDS ARE, THE NEXT wave of Oregon State research breakthroughs is likely to happen at the corner of Southwest Memorial Place and Monroe Avenue in Corvallis. That’s where the Jen-Hsun Huang and Lori Mills Huang Collaborative Innovation Complex is now taking shape. The 143,000-square-foot research and teaching facility will house a cutting-edge AI supercomputer, predicted to be among the most powerful university supercomputers in the nation. This advanced system will significantly boost the university’s research capabilities, said Dirk Petersen, director of Oregon State’s new Supercomputing Center. “This increase in power will drive advancements in AI, as well as several critical research areas that increasingly depend on AI — including climate science, clean energy, water resources, quantum computing simulations and biological system modeling,” he said. “It will provide researchers with the immense processing power needed for large-scale simulations, data analysis and machine learning tasks. Its advanced architecture will enable faster processing speeds and greater data handling capacity than previous systems.” In other words, research that once might have taken an OSU scientist a lifetime will now take place in record time. OREGON STATER PG/ 39
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