Oregon State University has emerged as a national leader in artificial intelligence research, with faculty working across robotics, machine learning, computer vision, embodied AI, bioinformatics, AI safety, and large-scale language models. Oregon State’s College of Engineering brings together experts advancing fields from microbiome modeling to autonomous robotics, including collaborations with major industry partners such as HP, Intel, and Agility Robotics. This strength is reflected in the recent recognition of Professor Alan Fern as a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the third such prestigious recognition for OSU faculty.
OSU’s Alan Fern named AAAI Fellow for pioneering AI research
A significant figure in OSU’s AI community over the past 20 years, Fern was recognized by AAAI for his notable “contributions to automated planning, reinforcement learning, and their application to humanoid robots.”
professor and co-director of the Dynamic Robotics and AI Lab
Blue Primary, Yellow Secondary
AAAI, the leading academic organization for AI research in the United States, will formally announce the honor at its conference in January 2025.
For Fern, the honor is meaningful—though not the driving force behind his work. “Personally, these things don’t drive me too much,” he said. “I get more excited by trying to do good research.” Still, he acknowledges the significance of the recognition: “Since high school, I’ve been interested in AI, and this is one of the top honors you can get in the area.”
Fern’s early work focused on automated symbolic planning, long before machine learning and planning were commonly integrated. He helped pioneer techniques that allow planning systems to improve with experience, drawing inspiration from how humans get faster and more efficient at tasks over time. He also launched a learning track in a major planning competition to grow research in this hybrid area.
“That idea—that a system should get faster and better the more it solves problems—has been a big motivation for me,” Fern said.
Eventually, Fern shifted toward robotics, collaborating with OSU colleague Jonathan Hurst, co-founder of Agility Robotics, on the challenge of getting legged robots to walk, run, and navigate the world. Early successes came with Cassie, a robot whose ability to learn locomotion in simulation—and then reliably transfer that learning to the physical world—proved transformative. Fern’s work extended to teaching robots to perform real tasks with arms and hands through Agility’s humanoid robot, Digit. The methods Fern’s group developed helped inspire today’s wave of highly capable humanoid robots.
“Now you go on the internet and search for humanoid research and demos from companies, you'll see them running and jumping and doing things you never would've imagined five years ago,” Fern said. “The way they're doing that is basically the recipe that we developed.”
Focus on real-world robotic tasks
Currently, Fern's lab is focused on enabling robots to perform real-world tasks, envisioning a future where robots amplify human productivity in construction, agriculture, and other labor-intensive fields. He's particularly excited about recent progress in integrating large language models and vision systems into robotics, allowing robots to understand natural language commands and learn tasks through demonstration.
"There's a lot of recent progress where you can train robots to do very specific tasks—make a sandwich, fold towels—things we really didn't know how to do well before," Fern said. “I see all this as steps toward more general, robust robot intelligence.”
Fern is the third OSU faculty member named an AAAI Fellow. The other two are Thomas Dietterich, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, and Kiri Wagstaff, Special Advisor on Artificial Intelligence, OSU Libraries. OSU alum Sriraam Natarajan, PhD ’07, is also an AAAI Fellow.
