PHOTO BY FIRSTNAME LAST CREDIT TK Spring 2025 41 AI IN OUR ORBIT A SMALL SAMPLING OF OREGON STATE’S MANY AI PROJECTS ILLUSTRATIONS BY DAVIAN-LYNN HOPKINS DIAGNOSING RARE DISEASES Though it may seem like an oxymoron, rare diseases aren’t particularly rare. When you consider them together as a category, as many as 25-30 million people are impacted in the U.S. alone. To speed up diagnosis and access to treatment, a team of Oregon State students and faculty and a rare disease expert at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle have created a chatbot for medical professionals. Instead of spending hours poring over journal articles to find answers, doctors can ask the chatbot for diagnosis help backed by verified sources. The team has funding from Amazon Web Services and the Oregon State University Advantage Accelerator program to develop the software, called Radiant (radiant. rtx.ai), into a commercial product. SHRINKING AI’S ENERGY APPETITE Projections show that by 2027, AI data centers could use as much energy annually as the entire country of the Netherlands. Hoping to reduce AI’s ravenous energy requirements, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Tejasvi Anand and his students designed a radical new chip that consumes half the energy of conventional architectures. High-speed communications chips need to minimize signal corruption as data zip around massive data centers that host chatbots and other AI agents. Reducing corruption requires signal processing, which typically involves using a power-hungry equalizer. Instead, Anand’s team uses AI principles to train a classifier to undo the corruption. OUTWITTING JOB APPLICATION ERRORS Once, you could expect that when you sent out a cover letter and resume, a person would be reading them at the other end. But today, applicant-tracking systems streamline most companies’ recruitment processes, scanning resumes for keywords that match the job description and potentially rejecting even highly qualified candidates who don’t prepare with a machine in mind. Alumni Akash Kannegulla, Ph.D. ’18, and Bo Wu, Ph.D. ’22, originally created the AI-powered Wisedoc (wisedoc.net) as doctoral students after becoming frustrated with the demands of formatting documents for submission to scientific journals. But when the COVID-19 pandemic triggered massive unemployment, they adapted it to the problem at hand. Now Wisedoc can check and correct for the most common applicant-tracking system issues, create cover letters tailored to specific job descriptions and improve resumes in ways designed to impress hiring managers. Oregon State University Alumni Association members get free access to this Beaver-made AI tool. (See ForOregonState.org/Benefits.) SPEEDING VACCINE CREATION COVID-19 sent the world into crisis as the virus spread rapidly across the globe with no vaccine to stop it. Now, researchers have developed an AI tool that can quickly find an optimal mRNA design that significantly enhances vaccine effectiveness and stability. The software tool, called LinearDesign, uses a series of advanced AI algorithms rooted in computational linguistics. The algorithm took just 11 minutes to find an optimal mRNA design for the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. This novel approach, developed by a team led by Liang Huang, professor of computer science, has resulted in vaccines that generate antibody responses up to 128 times greater than traditional methods. And it doesn’t stop there: LinearDesign also shows promise for the development of monoclonal antibodies and anti-cancer drugs.
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