
Meet Colin Shea-Blymyer, a Ph.D. student with dual majors in artificial intelligence and computer science in the College of Engineering at Oregon State University. His love of computer science started back in middle school when he would program his graphing calculator. Once in high school, he took computer science classes but also felt an attraction towards psychology and philosophy. He almost followed these new interests and studied psychology in college, but Isaac Asimov’s book I, Robot changed his mind. I, Robot showed him that there would be real psychological and philosophical questions to be asked in the future of AI research, and he wanted to be one of the people trying to answer them. ⠀
Three things attracted Colin to study at OSU:⠀
The strength of AI research at OSU, supported by some of the best researchers in the field.
His advisor Houssam Abbas, who saw his interest in philosophy as a strength and proposed an exciting research plan.⠀
Receiving the Outstanding Scholar Fellowship from the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science afforded him freedom in his research and funding security.⠀
Colin researches ethics and trust in artificial intelligence. He is working on a formal language - a logic - to describe the ethical obligations of autonomous systems like self-driving cars. He is also working on creating software that uses this logic to help humans understand and eventually control the ethics that a machine has learned.⠀
Colin’s best memories of graduate school so far have been the ones he’s made with his new friends since moving to Oregon. He also loves going hiking, playing a lot of D&D, and making it to the ski slopes in the Cascade Range as often as possible.⠀
In the future, Colin hopes to have a hand in developing technologies and policies that help ensure the safe and responsible use of artificial intelligence.