Portland AI Engineers

Tue, Oct 21 · 5:30 PM PDT

Portland AI Engineers October Meeting

Multnomah County Library Albina Branch, 205 NE Russell St, Portland, OR, US

We are excited to host a series of Lightning Round style presentations (see presenters below)
This will be several quick 10 minute presentations from builders leveraging AI in either the craft of software development (coding agents), and/or as features of a software product.

This is a great opportunity to sample a diverse range of what builders are up to in the AI engineering space. Be ready to provide feedback and your unique perspectives. We focus on the tech, this is not a sales pitch event.

Schedule:

• 5:30 - 6:00: Snacks and networking
• 6:00 - 7:00: Presentations
• 7:00 - 7:30: Wrap up and networking

Get involved:

• Present your work at a future event: Email us at info@portlandai.engineer to discuss sharing your project or insights
• Provide feedback: Help shape our community by sharing your ideas and suggestions
• Sponsor an event: Contact us to discuss partnership opportunities

For more information and to join our community, visit portlandai.engineer
Thank you to our amazing sponsors
Portland Incubator Experiment (PIE)
Silicon Florist
AlteredCraft
O'Reilly
Instrument

====== Presenters =======

### Damian Griggs

Description
Current generative AI often fails at long-form tasks due to a lack of coherent memory. I developed the Perceptual Grid Engine (PGE), an architecture that solves this by creating a functional long-term memory for AI. The design is directly inspired by the systematic spatial mapping techniques used by blind individuals for navigation. In this talk, I’ll break down the PGE’s architecture and showcase its power across four distinct, open-source applications, proving its versatility and potential for building more reliable and creative AI.
Bio
Damian Griggs is an inventor and strategic advisor whose experience with legal blindness informs his approach to solving complex challenges. He is the creator of the Perceptual Grid Engine (PGE), a novel AI architecture that addresses the critical long-term memory problem in generative models, and the inventor of a proprietary AI Film Pipeline to empower creators.

***

### Adam Keys

Description: Coding agents like Claude Code are delivering on the AI hype, today. For non-developers in particular, the potential here is tremendous. It’s never been easier for those who can sling a little bit of prose to start slinging code. We’ll explore how the whole product engineering team, product managers, designers, engineering managers, and developers of all experience levels, can start using coding agents today to take on tasks that were out of reach just 12 months ago.
Bio: Adam Keys builds software! He has worn the manager, leader, writer, developer hats throughout his career. Adam has spoken at RubyConf, RailsConf, OSCon, and many others over the years. He recently moved to Portland, OR from Texas to enjoy all four seasons and multiple biomes. Adam writes online at https://therealadam.com.

***

### Dr. Arielle Hammond, EdD

This talk introduces a multimodal AI learning coach that uses computer vision and speech recognition to guide children through hands-on STEM projects in real time. The system fuses YOLOv8-based visual detection with child-adapted Whisper STT and LLM-generated scaffolding to provide context-aware hints while learners build with LEGO and robotics kits. Designed for noisy, teacher-light environments, it aims to reduce staffing barriers and expand STEM access. Beyond education, the underlying perception and feedback framework has potential applications in multimodal coaching for physical skills such as music or sports.
Bio
Dr. Arielle Hammond is founder of Journey to STEAM, a K–8 STEM education company serving 50+ schools across Oregon. She specializes in creating scalable, equity-driven learning models. Her current work focuses on developing a multimodal AI coach that integrates computer vision, speech, and language understanding to enable accessible, hands-on STEM learning. She holds an Ed.D. in Educational Leadership.

***

### Andrew Musselman

Description: At ATA Systems, we’re building tools to make AI not only powerful for practitioners but also practical for everyday users. We are currently working with The AI Alliance on the open-source project Gofannon Agent Lab, which gives technical teams a collaborative environment to create, tune, and deploy AI agents. To make these agents accessible across an organization, we’ve also developed a development workflow to build front-end user interfaces for agents, giving a clean, intuitive way for non-technical staff to directly consume the agents built in Gofannon. This workflow allows us to stand up production-quality, user-facing applications driven by the flexibility and agility of AI agents in a matter of days rather than weeks. Together, they form a full stack for AI agent workflows: a practitioner’s workbench on the back end, and user-facing apps on the front end.

***

### Owen Spencer

From Skepticism to AI-First: A Development Team's Transformation Journey
Practical experience implementing AI practices within our development organization. Starting from traditional development workflows, I'll cover our adoption process, key tools and practices we integrated, real challenges we faced along the way, and measurable impacts on team productivity and code quality. The talk will conclude with our roadmap for deeper AI integration and lessons learned that other teams can immediately apply to accelerate their own AI adoption journey.
Bio:
Senior Director, DTC Applications and AI Enablement, with extensive background in development and managing engineering and UX teams across brand and agency environments. I focus on practical AI implementation strategies that drive measurable improvements in development workflows, team productivity, and product.