TAMPA, Fla. - September 13, 2024 - Actualization.AI, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded in 2024, today announced it has received a $275,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the agency’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The grant will fund development of AI solutions with strong reasoning skills, but which also comply with human rules, ethical guidelines and laws.
“We’re concerned with the lack of tools to ensure AI is doing what humans tell it to do,” said Dr. John Licato, Actualization.AI’s founder and owner. “We are on a mission to fix that, so we can help cure the world’s AI anxiety.’”
Dr. Licato is an expert in Natural Language Processing (NLP), a subfield of AI. The company is an outgrowth of his work at the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning (AMHR) Lab at the University of South Florida. Dr. Licato is joined by his peer, Dr. Animesh Nighojkar, to, in his words, “Create tools for automated vulnerability analysis of AI tools, to make sure that they follow human rules and laws.”
Prior to the SBIR award, Actualization AI was given the University of South Florida Research Foundation’s “Bull Ring Accelerator Grant” (BRAG), which was earmarked to help Actualization.AI with research and development.
Originally the company focused on translation advances in artificial intelligence produced at the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning lab at the University of South Florida, where Dr. Licato is a professor. When the company explored the important idea of AI in the compliance and regulation space, it pivoted to what Dr. Licato describes as, “the more general problem of how to make sure AI does what it is designed to do without deviating from its programmed instruction parameters.”
The NSF grant focuses on commercial impact research, providing a project framework around AI systems following the rules of humans, especially in subjects of, laws, policies, or contractual agreements.
This is an important area of AI research, because today’s societies are manifesting significant distrust of interactive AI agents and chatbots. “Most industries have adopted these aids, despite their known limitations particularly (given) problems of hallucination(s) and (the) inability to behave in accordance with the given policies,” said Dr. Licato.
One project from Actualization.AI is a solution to build out a secure, streamlined algorithm for converting rules, laws, and guidelines into a format that AI can more easily understand. The process can be applied in a broad variety of industries, including finance, cybersecurity, customer service, and medical insurance claims.
Dr. Licato explained, “Given that all industries with a customer interaction component are turning to chatbots, the economic impact of the project is significant. Our work accelerates the scientific and technological understanding of rule design, so systems are better interpreted by different humans as well as artificial intelligence systems.”
For more information visit https://www.actualization.ai.
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