ELECTRIC MINDS How Oregon companies are using AI A FLUID SITUATION Will OSU’s new tech hub make the grade? A Special Report $4.99 February 2024 | OregonBusiness.com THE TECHNOLOGY ISSUE
Order Your FREE Wine Touring Guide Experience an exceptional, intimate world of wine just west of Portland. Find your new favorite pour at TUALATINVALLEY.ORG SPEND THE WEEKEND WINING AND DINING WEST OF PORTLAND.
February 2024 FEATURES 26 AI Is Here to Stay. What Are Its Promises? What Are the Threats? Cover Story We assembled a group of Oregon thought leaders to talk about what AI tech will and won’t mean in the near future — and what leaders need to be talking about right now. 36 Locking It Down Portland-based HiddenLayer is offering cybersecurity protection for AI systems. 38 Second Sight How Synaptiq is using computer vision to help businesses use AI-driven products 40 Suitable Tech How Macro Law is using AI to upend law firms’ business models REGULARS 06 Editor’s Letter 10 Newsfeed 14 Tactics Mindy Stadtlander, CEO of Health Share of Oregon, shares her vision for the coordinated care organization. 18 Spotlight OSU’s microfluidics lab has already been designated a federal tech hub — and is vying for more federal funding. We looked at what microfluidics is already doing for medical research and tech manufacturing in the state. Follow @OregonBusiness for breaking news, blogs and commentary. Subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter featuring the best of OregonBusiness.com, plus articles from our print publication. To sign up, go to OregonBusiness.com. CHECK OUT THESE EXCLUSIVES (AND MORE) ON OREGONBUSINESS.COM n Merkley, Wyden Pledge $3.5M in EPA Funding for Water Systems in Prineville, Willamina — Communities will use the funds to improve water treatment and install new infrastructure. n Reinventing a Classic — All Classical Radio leaves the Portland name behind while committing to a new downtown space. n OHSU Raises $596M for Research, Breaking Previous Fundraising Record — The university’s Knight Cancer Institute received its largest share of funding in the 2022-23 fiscal year. 100 BEST NEWS Never Miss a 100 Best Survey! Find out how satisfied your employees are with their jobs through our anonymous and confidential surveys. Visit OregonBusiness.com/ 100BestNotify and sign up to receive information about how to register for future 100 Best surveys. ⁄Contents⁄ 44 Downtime Live, work and play with Greg Johnson, program administrator, Interstate Bridge Replacement Program. 46 Policy Brief University of Portland Pamplin School of Business professor Jon Down explains why your organization needs an AI policy. About the cover For this issue, art director Joan McGuire did explorations for the feature illustration by feeding photographs taken by staff photographer Jason E. Kaplan into Open AI’s DALL-E 3. The surprising results were used both for the cover and inside lead images of the special section. 3
[ OREGONIANS HELPING OREGONIANS ] In 2020, a project was launched that turned empty hotels into homes for the unhoused, including people who’d lost their homes in the recent wildfires. Brian Resendez, a broker bringing hotels into the fold, was so moved by the experience that he became a donor to support organizations providing critical services to the unhoused. Thank you, Brian. Want to find the perfect match for your generosity? Oregon Community Foundation can help. Let’s get started. “I give because I saw what an impact one person can have in our community.” — BRIAN RESENDEZ, DONOR SINCE 2021 LET’S GET STARTED | OREGONCF.ORG/GETSTARTED
The HALOTM Safety System with Garmin® Autoland—the most groundbreaking advancement in recent general aviation history—does everything you would do when you can’t. After alerting ATC, checking fuel levels and weather, it safely lands the aircraft. In short, it’s as if the controls were still in your hands. Contact Western Aircraft to schedule your test flight today! Elise Wheelock - elisew@westair.com | 208.338.1873 | westair.com Your guardian in the air.
⁄From the Editor⁄ A Harmonious Science? IN LATE 2022, it seemed like everybody I knew was playing with ChatGPT, or DALL-E, its adjacent image generator. I created an account myself and asked the tool to write some poems about my cats. They were dreck. I asked it to write a biography for me; it politely declined, saying I’m not well-known enough for it to find enough information. I asked it to write a biography for my partner; it confidently asserted he attended a college he did not. One day I wrote, “Can you write a version of ‘John Henry’ that replaces the protagonist with a 21st-century information worker and the steam-powered rock drill with an AI tool?” ChatGPT returned a five-verse song that included this verse: The day finally came when the AI did admit, That Joe’s insights and skills were truly legit. With handshake and code, they joined in alliance, Man and machine, a harmonious science. The chorus, by the way, went like this: Oh, Joe Henry! A legend so bold, Facing down AI, his story is told. Against lines of code, he’d valiantly stand, A modern-day hero in this cyberland. I’d already discovered that most of the poetry AI can produce is dreck, but I hadn’t expected to find it offensive. Putting aside that John is still a pretty common name—why replace it with Joe?—and the cringe-inducing word “cyberland,” there’s what ChatGPT did with the text itself. The folk song “John Henry” is, as I read it, a bleak tale about the human toll of the industrial revolution, a man who worked so hard to keep up with the steam drill that he got sick and died. ChatGPT’s retelling of it is the opposite of a gritty reboot. I’d say it misunderstands the point of “John Henry,” but it actually seems to understand it just fine, and seems a little too eager to assure me that everything is going to be just fine. AI might not be sentient yet, but it’s already a little defensive. That or the last year of headlines has me both nervous and skeptical. AI was one of the sticking points in contract negotiations during last year’s Screen Actors Guild strike; as this issue went to press, thousands of tech and media workers lost their jobs, with multiple companies directly citing AI — or at least automation — as one of the reasons they’re cutting so many workers loose. And, as I note in my first question in our cover story (p. 26), I’ve come to suspect a lot of new tech is marketed as AI when it’s not — instead, “AI” is just a new buzzword. That cover story — a roundtable discussion about the promises and threats of AI—came about in part because rather than give into my own cynicism, I was curious about what people who observe the tech more closely are thinking. As it turns out, there may truly be reason to hope that AI, and cruder automation tools, will free us from the more tedious aspects of our jobs and let us focus on what people are actually good at. At least, the human participants in our AI roundtable are approaching the tech with a mix of skepticism and optimism, and so were the subjects of this issue’s profiles of Oregon companies doing interesting work in the AI space, or using AI (see the special section on p. 36). In that sense, ChatGPT’s awful “Joe Henry” song may be correct, at least in spirit. But it took human beings—all of them smart and eloquent in uniquely human ways — to make me think so. VOLUME 47 ⁄ NUMBER 2 OREGON BUSINESS (ISSN 02798190) is published 8 times per year, monthly except Mar/Apr, Jul/Aug and Oct/Nov/Dec issues, by MEDIAmerica Inc. at 12570 S.W. 69th Ave., Suite 102, Portland OR 97223. Subscription inquiries should be directed to 503-445-8811. Subscription charge is $24.95 per year, $49.95 for two years in the USA. Single copies and back issues available at above address and at selected newsstands. The editor is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts. Copyright © 2024 by MEDIAmerica Inc. All rights reserved. All material is protected by copyright and must not be reproduced without written permission from the publisher. Printed in Oregon. Periodicals Postage Paid at Portland, OR. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Oregon Business, 12570 S.W. 69th Ave., Suite 102, Portland OR 97223 EDITORIAL EDITOR Christen McCurdy christenm@oregonbusiness.com ART DIRECTOR Joan McGuire joanm@oregonbusiness.com STAFF WRITER Sander Gusinow sanderg@oregonbusiness.com STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Jason E. Kaplan jasonk@oregonbusiness.com COPY EDITOR Morgan Stone CONTRIBUTING WRITERS Erika Bolstad, Jon Down, Melanie Sevcenko PUBLISHING PUBLISHER Courtney Kutzman courtneyk@oregonbusiness.com EVENTS MANAGER Craig Peebles craigp@oregonbusiness.com ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Evan Morehouse evanm@mediamerica.net ADVERTISING AND PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Greta Hogenstad gretah@mediamerica.net DIGITAL PRODUCTION COORDINATOR Alison Kattleman alisonk@mediamerica.net PRESIDENT AND CEO Andrew A. Insinga CONTROLLER Bill Lee BOARD OF DIRECTORS CHAIRMAN André W. Iseli PRESIDENT Andrew A. Insinga SECRETARY William L. Mainwaring TREASURER Win McCormack 6
macmiller.com | 971-666-MMFS | OREGON We’re here for all your commercial building mechanical needs: Design-Build Preventive HVAC Maintenance Controls Chiller and Boiler Specialists Plumbing Services HVAC Repairs and Retrofits Building Performance Standards Energy Services Our clients have trusted us with their buildings for over 50 years. That’s because we listen to what they want, and we set out to make it happen. We make buildings work better. TRUST
ELEPHANTS @ WORK Order sack lunches, box lunches, and more. FULL-SERVICE CATERING We provide everything–including the staff. PICKUP AND DROPOFF CATERING Enjoy hassle-free delivery and pickup services. CORPORATE GIFTING Give gift boxes and meal totes everyone will enjoy. LEFTBANK ANNEX Features 14,000 square feet of event space. THE CORBETT ROOM Features 1,740 square feet of event space. LET US DO THE COOKING! ELEPHANTSDELI.COM | 503.937.1099
ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT ●Fired Up. An Oregon jury decided PacifiCorp — the parent company of Pacific Power — is liable for at least $62 million in damages to nine victims of wildfires that tore through the state in 2020, the latest in a series of verdicts that have put the utility on the hook for more than $600 million related to the fires. Two more trials are scheduled this year. ●Iced Out. A series of mid-January storms throttled Oregon, taking out power for more than 165,000 Portland General Electric customers and more than 45,000 Pacific Power customers — with thousands of Oregonians in the dark for five days or more. At least 14 deaths were reported in connection with the storms. ECONOMY & FINANCE ●Steady Jobs. According to the Oregon Employment Department, Oregon’s unemployment rate held steady at 3.7% in December, with the health care, construction and retail sectors adding the most jobs that month. ●Jump Cuts. Nike announced an up to $2 billion cost-cutting initiative that will take place over the next three years. That plan includes layoffs, though the sportswear giant has not said how many jobs will be affected. POLITICS ●Withdrawn. Democrats in the Oregon Legislature unveiled a bill that would repeal portions of Measure 110, the 2020 ballot measure that decriminalized small amounts of illicit drugs. The new bill would recriminalize those drugs, but make it easier to access medications that treat withdrawal symptoms and funnel more money to drug courts. ●Blocked. The City of Portland filed a lawsuit against Oregon Public Broadcasting and one of its reporters in an attempt to block the public release of information about which businesses were required to pay into the Portland Clean Energy Fund in 2022. MANUFACTURING ●Terror in the Sky. An Alaska Airlines 737-9 MAX departed Portland for Southern California and returned to the airport abruptly after a large door plug ripped out of the plane, causing a rapid drop in pressure. The Federal Aviation Administration has grounded all 737-9 MAX flights and ordered an inspection of possible manufacturing defects in the Boeing-built planes. ●Down Beds. The Arlington, Va.-based Treatment Advocacy Center released a study breaking down the number of psychiatric hospital beds in each state. According to the paper, Oregon has just 704 beds statewide, and 16.6 per 100,000 residents. That number is higher than the national average of 10.8, but the study noted that 93% of Oregon’s beds are occupied by forensic psychiatric patients, leaving few available for patients with other needs. ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT ●New Movement. All Classical Radio received a $750,000 grant from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust — the largest grant in the station’s 40-year history — to support the network’s relocation to downtown Portland. ●Kickoff. RAJ Sports — which also holds ownership stakes in the NBA’s Sacramento Kings as well as two other sports teams and multiple venues — announced that it has taken controlling ownership of the Portland Thorns Football Club. FARMS & FORESTS ●Ag Administrator. Lisa Charpilloz Hanson, the former director of the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board, was hired as the interim director of the Oregon Department of Agriculture. EDUCATION ●Hats Off. More than four out of every five high school students in the Class of 2023 — the cohort of students who were freshman during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic — graduated on time, tying with the class before them and marking a gain from 2013-14, when more than a quarter of Oregon students were not graduating on time. RESTAURANTS & RETAIL ●Let ’Em Cook. Eleven O r e g o n restaurants, including Portland’s Langbaan and Han Oak, and five Oregon chefs, including Kann’s Gregory Gourdet and Josh Dorcak of Ashland’s Mäs, were named as 2024 James Beard Award semifinalists. Finalists will be announced in April and awards will be announced in June. HEALTH CARE ●Whistleblower Suit. Joshua Bramblett, a former lead nurse at Portland’s Legacy Good Samaritan Medical Center, filed a lawsuit against the hospital. Bramblett’s complaint alleges that he was unfairly terminated after warning management of lax security for years prior to a deadly shooting there in May 2022. ⁄Newsfeed⁄ Two more turns in the hot seat Better make that reservation. The NWSL’s Portland Thorns have been sold to RAJ Sports. The team will continue to play at Providence Park but seeks a new training facility. Langbaan 10
Since 1974, we have helped countless businesses of all sizes navigate a wide array of legal problems large and small. We are ready to assist in matters of corporate law, dispute resolution, real estate, IP, labor and employment law, and more. Business-focused advice and advocacy for five decades. Scan above or call 503.221.1440 to see how we can help. Celebrating 50 Years in Law
Visit mowp.org/circle to become a Sustainer today! Make a lasting impact for older adults by joining our Sustainers Circle. Your commitment to regular monthly support is more than a donation; it’s a lifeline. It ensures a consistent, reliable source of funding, enabling us to directly address the growing needs of our community’s older adults. Every Meal Matters Learn more!
February 22-25, 2024 PORTLAND EXPO CENTER HOMESHOWPDX.COM Artful Living. Inspired Spaces. • Showcase Gardens • Guest Australian Floral Designer • Culinary Kitchen Stage • Water Garden • Tiny Homes & Village Gardens • Remodeling Ideas + Home Building Experts • Building Science + Sustainable Building • Hands-On Workshops, Speaker Seminars • Plant + Flower Society Exhibits • Winter Lights Festival installation • Bentley Fleurs Design installation • Plant Sale • Beer + Wine Garden $3 OFF TICKETS ONLINE ONLY. USE CODE: HOMEGARDEN24 Valid any day of show; Purchase online only using this promo code; Not valid with any other offers; limited to two (2) tickets per order. PRESENTING SPONSOR
⁄Tactics⁄ How were enrollment numbers affected by the pandemic? They grew significantly. Federally, there was a hold put on redeterminations; that’s the process that people go through every year to reapply for Medicaid. So we weren’t ending Medicaid eligibility; we kept getting new people and then didn’t lose anyone else. [After our conversation, a Health Share spokesperson told OB the CCO’s enrollment grew by 27% between January 2020 and its high-water mark in July 2023.] We are just now going through the process of redetermining everybody. [Also during the pandemic], the state expanded coverage to folks who don’t have citizenship, and so saw enrollment increase. And Oregon also just got permission to keep kids until their 6th birthday covered on Medicaid — so they don’t have to reapply every year. But there are some really cool things to try to provide some stability for people and their insurance. We have about 460,000 members currently. You’ve said that right now you are focused on behavioral health. What aspect of that are you looking at? We’re trying to understand the size and scope of the population of people with either opioid-use disorder or a stimulant-use disorder and/or a severe and persistent mental illness. What we have found so far is that it’s not as if the population [with those disorders] has grown disproportionately pre-pandemic to now, but that the level of acuity — the complexity of what’s going on — is just much, much higher. We think it’s partially because of the kind of drugs that are in our community now, and because of challenges and access to behavioral-health services. So we’re wrapping our heads around what that means; how we identify that group of folks and how we design a better care model that works better for them across our clinical services, behavioral health and physical health hospital services — and with our housing partners. I think one of the things that I’m hearing from a lot of people who are doing work in this space is we know the problem is really bad, and it’s a lot worse than it was, say, three to five years ago, but we don’t know how much worse, in terms of the number of people in need of acute care. [Stadtlander referenced an analysis of Health Share’s population, conducted by the Providence Center for Outcomes Research and Education, published in November.] Nearly 10% of our adult population claims diagnosis of stimulant-use disorder, opioid-use disorder or psychosis. That is contributing significantly to the rate of inpatient hospitalizations. It’s medical beds for those conditions; it’s for other things. We’re trying to understand, what are those other things they’re being hospitalized for? It has given us an idea of the higher level of acuity behavioral-health services that we think are needed in our community, and we’re starting to talk to our partners at the county and at the state about what they’re seeing, to compare notes and align on a strategy. Mindy Stadtlander Takes the Reins at Health Share of Oregon The CEO of the state’s largest coordinated care organization says in 2024 Health Share and its partners will focus on improving access to behavioral health services. INTERVIEW BY CHRISTEN McCURDY In June Health Share of Oregon’s board of directors announced that it had selected Mindy Stadtlander as its CEO after serving as the organization’s interim CEO since January 2023 and as its chief operating officer since July 2020. Stadtlander holds a bachelor of science in biochemistry from Chatham University and a master’s in public health from the University of Pittsburgh. A self-described “data nerd,” Stadtlander initially worked in scientific research but “found the social environment lacking.” After working at a federally qualified health center in Montana, Stadtlander found herself fascinated by health care access. Prior to joining Health Share, she worked at Care Oregon in a series of senior-level positions, most recently as senior vice president of Medicaid and Network Services. Health Share is the largest of 16 coordinated care organizations, or CCOs, in the state. Created in 2011 after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the CCOs were designed to coordinate physical, mental and dental care for Oregon Health Plan patients in a specific geographical area. Health Share — which serves Multnomah, Clackamas and Washington counties — currently serves about 460,000 patients in the tricounty area. Stadtlander joined Health Share during a critical moment for the organization, and for health care in general. When she joined, Health Share’s enrollment was surging due to a federal Medicaid policy change. Now, with the end of the federal government’s COVID-19 emergency declaration, Stadtlander is now focusing on behavioral health, a crisis that has grown much more acute in recent years. Stadtlander spoke with Oregon Business about the data her organization has gathered and what Health Share is planning to do to tackle the problem. This interview has been edited for space and clarity. 14
JASON E. KAPLAN When you say 10% of the adult population identifies as having a substance-abuse disorder, or severe and persistent mental illness, do you have any data to compare that to? Do you know what percentage of your population had those issues before? Because I’m a data nerd, I’ll be precise on the words: 10% of that population has an insurance claim that has one of those. It’s probably an undercount. What we saw is in those cohorts of stimulant-use disorder, opioid-use disorder and severe and persistent mental illness — those grew by 5% to 11%, depending on which cohort you’re talking about, whereas our membership grew by more than 13% over the pandemic. So it’s hard to compare apples to apples, then. Yes, but it’s not that we’re seeing proportionately a lot more of folks with those conditions — certainly a little bit, but not relative to the population growth — but that the acuity is much higher. You are starting to talk with community partners about what the need is, and how we address these problems. What are those conversations looking like? What do you think Health Share’s role is moving forward? We’ve made a bunch of investments between Health Share and some of our partners, including Care Oregon, over the last year and a half around low-acuity, peer-led substance-use treatment centers, and each of the three Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington county investments in expanding the behavioral- health workforce. And we’re upgrading into electronic health records. Now we’re talking about how we probably need more inpatient psychiatric service capacity and exploring with partners what that might look like, and how they might be able to build that. We’re working with a series of providers to understand what the availability is, so we build more secure residential treatment facilities. We have the estimates about how many we think we need; we’re working with OHSU in conversations about modeling what happens if we add beds in certain areas, so that we have that evidence-based, data-informed approach as we go. This is raising the question in my head: How quickly can we start to add more beds to the system? The details are complicated, but I think everybody can agree that we need more beds. I think that’s one of the tensions we have right now. It took us 30 years of underinvestment in the behavioral-health system to get to where we are today. I do think some patience is needed around how we are going to get out of this, knowing that these are multiyear investments. I think there are things that we can do right now, when you have housing and behavioral-health providers and mobile crisis lines taking care of the same people, and sharing information and doing a better job at care coordinating. We’re in conversations about how to move in that direction now, and doing some early pilots of that work. We’re doing some feasibility studies around what it would take to build those higher-acuity pieces, and just getting that ball moving, because we know the need is not going away in two years. Is there anything on the horizon for 2024 that you want to talk about? Between [the behavioral-health work] and ensuring that, in redetermination, we’re doing a good job supporting members staying on their health plan, that’s where I spend the bulk of my time. What are you doing when you’re not working? I have three kids. They are 13, 10 and 8, and we have an acre of property with an enormous garden. Sometimes when I’m in one-on-ones with folks that don’t require me onscreen, I’m puttering around outside. And we just got back from the first big vacation since I got the job: Over Thanksgiving weekend, we went hiking, scrambling and climbing in Red Rock just outside of Las Vegas. 15
Wherever ambition takes you, we’ll help make it happen. You already built something incredible. When you’re ready to elevate your business even higher, you need an insurance partner who can give you a platform for scale and even greater success. See how we can help your business go further at MMANorthwest.com/Oregon. Beaverton (971) 888-7950 Corvallis (541) 926-4291 Newport (541) 265-7768 Madras (541) 475-2249 MMANorthwest.com Eugene (541) 942-0555 Bend (541) 306-2080 Medford (541) 779-1321 McMinnville (503) 472-2121
BY SANDER GUSINOW WITH EACH TURN of the microscope, the tiny gray chip looked more and more like an M.C. Escher painting. What appeared as a tiny gray speck expanded like a kaleidoscope into hundreds of honeycomb-shaped grooves and nodes, capable of delivering an electric shock to a patient’s blood cells, one which separates cancerous and non-cancerous cells for study. Jose Luis Montoya Mira, a research engineer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute, compared the process to un-blending a smoothie. “When you take all the blood from patients and you analyze it all together, the result is kind of like a mess, because you have all of these cells in the blood that are different,” Montoya Mira says. “When you drink a smoothie, you say, ‘Oh, this is sweet, it has blueberry and strawberry in it,’ but you can’t actually say, ‘This is blueberry, this is strawberry.’ What we can do is separate all the ingredients into completely separate compartments, and that gives you a more granular picture of what’s going on.” That capability is one example of microfluidics — an emerging field in which small amounts of fluid, often one quadrillionth of a liter, are placed onto a microchip through microscopic grooves, wells and channels. In health care, the technology allows for cellular ⁄Spotlight⁄ PHOTO BY JASON E. KAPLAN Oregon’s microfluidics Tech Hub joins academic and industry partners to help small fluids make a big leap. About the CHIPS and Science Act The Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) and Science Act, was signed into law on August 9, 2022. The act directs $280 billion in spending over 10 years for scientific R&D and commercialization; semiconductor R&D, manufacturing and workforce development; tax credits for chip production and more. Its goal is to boost U.S. innovation, competitiveness and national security. Micro-Chasm Jose Luis Montoya Mira, a research engineer at Oregon Health & Science University’s Knight Cancer Institute 18
study on an unprecedented level. In 2018 researchers at Oregon Health & Science University discovered the existence of “hybrid” cancer cells—cells that are a blend of tumor and blood cells, used by tumors to infiltrate, grow and adapt to a patient’s immune system — while observing ultrasounds taken from a microfluidics device co-designed by Montoya Mira. These cells, though likely used by tumors since the dawn of time, have gone undetected by humans until now. In industry, microfluidics gives machines something they’ve always needed: cooling. The more microchips that run on top of one another in large computing devices — such as supercomputers used in data centers — the hotter they get and the greater the risk of melting becomes. Injecting liquid onto the chips allows for more to be stacked on top of one another without overheating. Microfluidics also helps in the discovery and manufacturing of specialty and industrial chemicals, many of which can be manipulated more easily at the cellular level. OHSU is one of 40 institutes, companies and municipalities taking part in the Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub, an industry coalition led by Oregon State University’s College of Engineering professor Tom Weller. In October the group was designated as a national Tech Hub by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. The Tech Hubs Program was enacted as part of the CHIPS and Science Act in 2022. The goal of the tech hubs is to drive job creation and increase American competitiveness, all while bringing laboratory technologies like microfluidics to commercial scale. After a four-month application process, which ends Feb. 29, between five and eight of the 32 nationally recognized tech hubs will receive awards between $40 million and $70 million to grow and scale their respective industries. The microfluidics collation was one of two Oregon institutions to receive the designation, along with the Pacific Northwest Mass Timber Tech Hub, which is also led by an OSU team. Even though the odds of getting chosen from the federal investment are statistically low, the program is authorized to distribute $10 billion to tech hubs over the next five years, meaning this won’t be the only opportunity. But Weller says Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub (or “CorMic” Tech Hub, as he and some other members call it) has reason to stand out from the competition. A 2022 industry forecast by Straits Research estimated the global microfluidics market would grow from $20.98 billion in 2022 to $117.13 billion by 2031, and from $5.28 billion in 2022 to $21.45 billion by 2032 in the United States, driven by the technology’s relevance in biological and chemical research, rising interest among manufacturers and the administration’s goals of manufacturing independence from China. “The application of microfluidics and thermal management for the semiconductor industry is a really recent thing, which has been amplified by data centers; graphics-processing units NVIDIA, Intel and other companies are producing; and just the overall demands on computational resources. I think I heard the other day that data centers are 2% of energy consumption in the country. That certainly wasn’t the case 10 years ago,” Weller says. “And in the specialty chemical manufacturing area, a lot of that has been offshored. Most of the production is happening in Asia and other parts of the world, and that’s right at the beginning of the supply chain for the semiconductor industry. Just in the last two years, the government has realized that puts us in a very vulnerable position when we rely so heavily on materials coming in from outside of the country. Part of what the tech hub can do is enable very efficient and rapid discovery of new specialty chemicals, and that would allow us to restore a lot of that chemical- manufacturing capability to the U.S. as well.” Weller adds that the environmental component of microfluidics also makes it a good candidate for federal investment. “When you have a processor that’s getting very hot, and you marry that with microfluidics technology, it can pull the heat off very effectively. It reduces the amount of energy that you use, so there are pretty significant energy savings, like 30% to 40% energy savings for data centers,” Weller says. The goal of the CorMic hub is to create an environment where microfluidics startups and existing companies Research engineer Jose Luis Montoya Mira shows the surface of a new device under a powerful microscope at OHSU’s Knight Cancer Institute. This is a device used at OHSU to isolate cells from a blood sample that are indicative of cancer. 19
have a place to easily grow and develop manufacturing microfluidics devices into industrial-scale operations. Even though microfluidics technology has advanced significantly at the academic level, Weller and Montoya Mira say the manufacturing component still needs to catch up. “If you look at the field of microfluidics, the complexity of the devices at the academic level versus the complexity of devices at the industrial level is quite different. The industrial-level devices are a lot simpler,” Montoya Mira says. “If you’re in the lab and 60% of your chips work perfectly, great. That’s perfect. But if 60% is what you’re getting when you’re a company, that’s really, really bad. You need it to be a reproducible science, because if you’re not 100% perfect, your customer is going to get mad at you, they’re not going to buy your devices and they’ll try to trash your company.” “There’s a big difference between making 10 of something and 10,000 of something,” Weller says. To address the question of scalability, the CorMic Hub enables companies to access a business that has been producing single-cell microfluidics at the industrial scale for decades. One of the linchpins of the project is the involvement of Hewlett-Packard. The Corvallis-based printing and software company has been producing microfluidics devices for its inkjet printers at scale since it debuted the ThinkJet printer in 1984. “HP is a world leader in manufacturing microfluidics, and they’ve only just recently started to use that same technology for biomedical printers. They do single-cell dispensing on their print systems and they also use it for additive manufacturing, so they have leveraged that technology substantially in different industries. Now that they’re with the tech hub, they’re making that open to outside users to come in and use it for newer applications,” Weller says. “Essentially, HP will be potentially manufacturing for people, but they don’t have to be the ones who are always creating new products. They’re using the technology of other people.” HP first developed microscopic inkjet printing when an engineer was testing the response of a thin silicon-based film to electrical stimulation. When electricity heated the silicon, the droplets of fluid lying under the film were expelled. Large, industrial inkjet printers, which printed by dropping thousands of tiny droplets on a sign or billboard all at once, already existed, but the discovery allowed HP to miniaturize the system — and become an early adopter of microfluidics technology. Paul Benning, the chief technologist for HP 3D Printing, says the company’s experience manufacturing microfluidics chips at scale is what they hope to share with burgeoning businesses trying to use microfluidics in other disciplines. “Every inkjet print cartridge that you get, on the business end of one of those is a silicon chip that has everything from transistors to microfluidic channels to control features with analog and digital circuitry. It’s really those five capabilities, and for the ability to build and manufacture microfluidic devices at volume, that we are bringing to the tech hub to pursue chip cooling and biotech applications,” says Benning. Benning says HP is the “center of the universe” for microfluidics technology, and that the company is already branching into other applications beyond inkjet printing. “It’s really a way to invite small companies, startups and other interested parties to come and access infrastructure, and also the expertise, the people and capabilities that have been built up around that.” PAUL BENNING, HEWLET-PACKARD OSU College of Engineering professor Tom Weller leads the Corvallis Microfluidics Tech Hub. 20
“We’ve already branched out into single-cell isolation in life science and medical research, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, that’s leveraging some of the inkjet printing capabilities. And we’ve started a development effort around chip cooling, and those are all elements of the tech hub,” Benning says. “It’s really a way to invite small companies, startups and other interested parties to come and access infrastructure, and also the expertise, the people and capabilities that have been built up around that.” Skip Newberry, president of the Technology Association of Oregon, another member of the CorMic Hub, says the team assembled for the microfluidics hub, as well as Oregon’s talent pool, makes it a lucrative option for companies looking to commercialize the technology. “In terms of the project team, we have a mix of larger players like HP, NVIDIA and Intel. We have some of the largest players in semiconductors and microfluidics, so if I’m looking for strategic partners and go-to-market partners, those are some of the more interesting ones that any company could want to be with,” says Newberry, who adds that recent developments and partnerships between academia and industry have helped set the stage for the CorMic Hub to be successful. “There’s a sort of confluence of things that I think are pretty exciting: One of them is the recent investment by the CEO of NVIDIA to OSU for a high-performance computing or supercomputing center. From a workforce standpoint, there was really interesting data that the State of Oregon shared during a presentation that I was involved with back in November. It showed the percentage of semiconductor R&D talent that is located in Oregon compared to the next 10 states that have a high concentration of semiconductor workforce, and in Oregon, the percentage was essentially greater than all the other 10 states combined. So that underscores the fact that Oregon is really a leader globally when it comes to a base of talent; a concentration of talent that is doing really critical semiconductor R&D work.” Weller says federal funding from the CHIPS and Science Act would grant the tech hub the resources to grow dozens of companies and create thousands of jobs in the rural areas between Eugene and Salem, where he says the EDA wants to see job growth. Since the primary focus of the tech hubs proOur Business is Yours Nathaniel Brigham & Aimee Brigham, Co-Founders of Aluma Aesthetic Medicine Your success is our success—and the success of our entire region! Our mission and purpose is clear: We support businesses of all types and sizes in succeeding and thriving throughout our region. gram is to drive job creation, the tech hub is already partnering with community colleges and the Oregon Workforce Partnership to be able to staff new microfluidics companies. He says the industry requires people with two-year degrees at the technician level all the way up to Ph.D.s focused on research and development. “We’re also trying to create a pipeline by engaging in some K-12 activities as well,” says Weller. Even if the CorMic Hub isn’t selected for the first round of EDA funding, Weller says the collaborations made possible by the tech hub will continue, that more grant opportunities will eventually be available and that the partnerships will continue well after the application deadline closes. For Montoya Mira, the practical applications of microfluidics technology are still being discovered. He says his cancer-screening device could potentially be used to detect any type of cell and could help in the screening of Alzheimer’s and other metabolic conditions. He says the industrial side of microfluidics manufacturing is still waiting to be developed, but when it comes to microfluidics in chips, he can already see the potential benefits of continuing collaboration. “A lot of our [microfluidics] devices, underneath the devices, we have exactly the same cooling system that has been done in all these other devices that need that cooling. So we use the same technique on our technologies for our benefit,” says Montoya Mira. “There is not a single center or specialist, no single person who can have all the know-how and all the ideas of how to take the microfluidic field to the next level, so it’s a community push. There is more that has to happen than can happen in one single lab.” “Oregon is really a leader globally when it comes to a base of talent; a concentration of talent that is doing really critical semiconductor R&D work.” SKIP NEWBERRY, PRESIDENT OF TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION OF OREGON PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN 21
Fast, efficient, and on your schedule. Since 2002, WestAir Charter and its fleet of Pilatus turbine aircraft has been a trusted partner to the Pacific Northwest business community. Let us be your partner in success. AT THE SPEED OF BUSINESS 888.511.5004 | westaircharter.com 20 ANNIVERSARY th
WE DO BUSINESS LOANS AND MORE! See what we can offer your small business at NWCU.com. All loans subject to approval. Not SBA guaranteed.
The greater Portland area has 60,000 fewer housing units than it currently needs with 220,000 new units needed by 2040. From home builders and skilled trades people, to civic leaders and consumers; the Home Building Association of Greater Portland unites the industry and the community to build a thriving region. HBA and HBF are dedicated to maximizing housing affordability, accessibility, and choice for all. WWW.HBAPDX.ORG • WWW.BUILDHOPEPDX.ORG
Cass Dykeman is a professor of counseling at Oregon State University, and prior to that, he worked as an elementary and high school counselor in Seattle. His expertise includes the use of corpus linguistics, Bayesian statistics and artificial intelligence in research. Charles Jennings, former founder and CEO of NeuralEye, an AI company specializing in recognition intelligence for computer vision, is the author of Artificial Intelligence: Rise of the Lightspeed Learners. He is currently board chair of Portland’s Swan Island Networks, a security intelligence company. K S Venkatraman is senior director for artificial intelligence computing at NVIDIA Corporation, and an executive committee member of Oregon’s Workforce Talent Development Board. His teams develop products that enable technologies like self-driving cars, natural language processing and recommendation systems. Rebekah Hanley, a faculty member at the University of Oregon School of Law, teaches foundational lawyering skills, professional responsibility and advanced legal writing courses. As Oregon Law’s current Galen Scholar in Legal Writing, Professor Hanley is studying generative AI and its implications for law school teaching and the practice of law. This image was generated by Open AI’s DALL-E 3 program, using Jason Kaplan’s photograph that appears on page 29 as source input. The individual portraits below served as fodder for the images appearing along the right-hand edge of page 27. AI Roundtable | Here’s who was in the room: JASON E. KAPLAN 26
AI Is Here to Stay. What Are Its Promises? What Are the Threats? BY CHRISTEN McCURDY Oregon Business convened a group of thought leaders in the field to talk about what we know (and don’t know) about artificial intelligence — and what business leaders and policymakers should be thinking about as the tech accelerates. Skip Newberry, president and CEO of the Technology Association of Oregon, co-facilitated the conversation. Artificial intelligence dominated headlines throughout 2023 and into 2024. In November OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was ousted from his role, only to be rehired less than a week later. And just two weeks into the year, more than 5,000 workers in the tech sector had lost their jobs, with tech giants like Google attributing the cuts at least partially to AI, which is already allowing companies to automate jobs previously performed by human beings. Policymakers have put an ear to the ground on AI, too. In October President Biden issued an executive order establishing standards for AI safety and security and for protecting individual digital privacy, and in December Gov. Tina Kotek signed an executive order to create an advisory council that will guide the state government’s use of artificial intelligence. As the 2024 election kicked into gear, we saw a glimpse of how the rise of AI could affect the political sphere, New Hampshire voters receiving robocalls in January with a convincingly Biden-like voice telling them, inaccurately, that if they voted in the primary they wouldn’t be permitted to vote in November’s general election. We’ve been keeping our eyes on the rise of artificial intelligence — in September, for example, we reported on GameChanger, an AI-enabled software tool that helps spectators keep score at high school sporting events, then generates a prose story parents can send to grandparents and recruiters. In that story, we noted that AI is already disrupting media, with The Oregonian announcing that it uses generative AI tools for real estate listings And way back in February 2022, we covered the rise of wearable health tech devices, many of which use predictive AI tools to help users manage their health. But the tech has accelerated so quickly that it seemed like it was high time to talk about the big picture. And to do that, we called in some experts. In mid-December, I assembled a group of people who work with and study artificial intelligence to talk about where the tech is heading, what they’re concerned about and what makes them feel hopeful. What follows is a transcript of that conversation, edited for space and clarity. 27
AI AN IN-DEPTH REPORT Oregon Business: To start with, how do we define AI? I’m asking because it seems useful to make sure we’re all talking about the same thing, and also because, as a cynic, sometimes I see things marketed as AI that just don’t sound like what I understand AI to be. So how do you define it? Charles Jennings: I define it as the art and science of teaching machines — of any kind — to learn. The difference between AI and everything that’s come before it is that AIs continue to learn and grow, and they feed on data in a completely unique way. And they are growing at a rate that most people don’t understand or comprehend. K S Venkatraman: Artificial intelligence has been around for more than 75 years starting with the Turing Machine. Since then, we’ve had machine learning, which is more learning from patterns of data to predict future behavior. Over the last decade or so, we’ve had this rise of accelerated computing coupled with the availability of large amounts of data. That combination has led to a field of AI called deep learning, which is really mimicking neural networks in our brain. Now we sit at the cusp of this exponential curve with generative AI, and that has led to computers being superhuman in vision and language domains, with many more things to come. Because of this explosion, every economic sector is scrambling to figure out how to incorporate AI into their businesses, so there is an enormous need for skill development — or at least learning how to use these AI models responsibly and basic foundational skills. OB: What should business leaders be considering as they’re thinking about, “How do I incorporate AI in what I do?” I realize that so much is going to vary depending on your sector. But what are the big things that people should be thinking about both in terms of the business case and the ethics? Jennings: I think 2024 will be a big year for the vertical industry AI. I think virtually every vertical from agriculture to zookeeping is going to have some kind of AI disruption. Two weeks ago, I was talking with the CFO of a big construction company. They’ve got a really sophisticated AI application for bidding on big construction projects. I think he said they had 10 human bidders in their company previously; they’re already down to seven. He said, “We’re never going to get to zero because there’s always the personal relationship, there’s the judgment.” They’re keeping the senior ones, and the junior ones are being eliminated. In terms of what companies should be thinking about, you’ve got to have safety and ethics very high on the list. For anybody who’s looking for guidance, I would recommend the new NIST framework. They’re doing a really good job of science and measurement “Turing machines, first described by Alan Turing in Turing 1936–7, are simple abstract computational devices intended to help investigate the extent and limitations of what can be computed. Turing’s ‘automatic machines’, as he termed them in 1936, were specifically devised for the computing of real numbers. They were first named ‘Turing machines’ by Alonzo Church in a review of Turing’s paper (Church 1937). Today, they are considered to be one of the foundational models of computability and (theoretical) computer science.” Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Charles Jennings and K S Venkatraman PHOTOS BY JASON E. KAPLAN 28
AI AN IN-DEPTH REPORT and collaboration with the industry. I think you’ll see a lot of good guidance on security and ethics coming from NIST over the next year. Cass Dykeman: My students ask me, “What can I write using LLM and what can’t I write?” I told my faculty, “I am not going to play AI Police. I’m just not going to do it.” I want them to learn how to effectively use it, so I’ll have them use an LLM to write a term paper, and then I’ll have them critique the paper. Now, the really smart ones use another LLM to critique the paper — which is fine. I’m also trying to work on an architecture that will come up with research questions, gather the data and write an article. Then I’m going to submit it to a journal — completely transparent about what I did — and see what the journal does in terms of reaction. Rebekah Hanley: It’s a time of shifting norms, and I think there’s a lot of diversity of thought in the university — and K-12 as well — about what’s appropriate in terms of reliance on generative AI for research, for writing, for editing. We’re empowering and encouraging students to ask a lot of questions, to clarify with whichever instructors overseeing a particular project: What is allowed? What is expected? I do think that there’s a real risk of well-intentioned people getting sideways in terms of academic integrity questions. There’s just a good-faith disagreement about whether what they did is consistent or not consistent with course policies or university policies relating to independent work product creation, plagiarism. I think in terms of citation, we’re going to see, and probably already are seeing, a lot of disagreements about what’s appropriate, what’s inappropriate, what’s cheating. OB: I was just thinking about how not that long ago, teachers would have said that using spell-check or grammar check is cheating — because you’re supposed to learn how to spell and you’re supposed to learn the rules of grammar. Now I don’t think anybody would say that. I say to writers, “If you haven’t spell-checked your story before you turn it in, you’re not done with it.” I wonder if the way we think about plagiarism is going to change in the coming years because we have these tools. Venkatraman: They said the same thing about the calculator. I think that repetitive nature of things that we do is getting increasingly automated, and so that frees us up for some higher-level cognitive thinking and some multistep reasoning, which these models are not capable of today. It’s a good copilot to have. Dykeman: I’m a reviewer for a number of journals, and I’m getting emails from the journals saying, “Do not use LLMs to review your articles.” Even the artificial intelligence journals are saying this. But it’s “The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST’s activities are organized into physical science laboratory programs that include nanoscale science and technology, engineering, information technology, neutron research, material measurement, and physical measurement. From 1901 to 1988, the agency was named the National Bureau of Standards.” Source: Wikipedia “Large language models (LLMs) are machine learning models that can comprehend and generate human language text. They work by analyzing massive data sets of language.” Source: Cloudflare Skip Newberry, Cass Dykeman and Rebekah Hanley 29
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTcxMjMwNg==