Introduction
William Brendel didn’t plan to stay at Oregon State University. He didn’t plan to get a Ph.D. And he definitely didn’t plan to build AI systems used by hundreds of millions of people. He arrived at Oregon State in 2004 because, of the universities on his shortlist, it was the closest to the ocean. He loved to surf.
A French exchange student, Brendel planned to spend only a year at Oregon State. That turned into seven. His interest in AI was similarly serendipitous. A fan of Pixar, Brendel initially wanted to research computer graphics. But when a change of advisors brought him to work with professor Sinisa Todorovic, Brendel’s interest shifted to artificial intelligence, and he became Todorovic’s first doctoral student.
From academia to big tech
Brendel’s shift to AI was a risk. Most commercial applications were related to early search engines or rudimentary face detection, neither of which were as successful then as they are now. "We were a bunch of nerds who loved doing math," he recalled. "We loved seeing the machine doing things that were completely sci-fi." His research focused on 3D reconstruction, spatiotemporal video segmentation, and event recognition, among other areas.
After completing his Ph.D. in computer science, Brendel moved into a sequence of roles at Google, Amazon, and Snap that put his research into production. The expertise Brendel cultivated at Oregon State was unexpectedly in high demand as a wave of AI innovation washed across the globe.
Ph.D. computer science ’11
Blue Primary, Yellow Secondary
At Google, he led the Suggested Edits project, a self-correcting video quality system deployed across YouTube. He worked on the visual search infrastructure at A9, an Amazon subsidiary. And at Snap, he shipped machine learning features for augmented reality and friend recommendations that served hundreds of millions of users.
After roughly a decade with big tech, however, he decided to shift to work that felt more direct and impactful. An algorithm designed to recommend a show that a user is likely to want to watch, he realized, is similar to one that can predict the food someone with a chronic illness should eat.
That inspired him to co-found Heali, a nutrition platform for chronic disease management. He raised $4 million in seed funding and built a platform processing over two billion nutrition data points across over 200 medical conditions. In 2023, he started Crossroads Venture Studio to help early founders with a technical background gain the operational insight he wished he'd had when he started Heali.
Lessons from a career in AI
The field of artificial intelligence has exploded in the years since Brendel earned his PhD. It’s now so saturated, Brendel said, that claiming that “having an ‘AI company’ will soon sound as redundant as claiming to have an ‘internet company.’"
But in a field where the barrier to entry is falling, Brendel sees genuine expertise as more valuable, not less.
He encourages students to learn the foundations, to use AI as an aid but not a replacement for understanding and, above all, to "think for yourself, think critically, and be resilient." These traits, he argues, are what a university education unlocks, and no tool can shortcut the process of acquiring them.
Explore Oregon State’s graduate programs in artificial intelligence, the first interdisciplinary AI programs to be offered in the U.S.
