John Licato, a professor at the University of South Florida, understands the hype of artificial intelligence more than most. That's why he wants to capitalize on his expert background to start an innovative AI company to help other companies.
Licato is an assistant professor at USF's computer science and engineering department. He's also the founding director of the college's Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab, a cross-disciplinary lab studying ways to improve the human reasoning of AI. He wants to leverage and commercialize the lab's work and mission with Actualization.ai, his new startup.
"We're pioneering something here," Licato said, "... and we're doing it in a space that there are a lot of people talking about it, but there are very few people that actually have the AI background and actually can understand the underlying technologies."
Simply put, Licato and his team of Ph.D.s and undergraduate researchers want to build tools to help people reason better. They plan to create several products — and potentially video games — but are starting with a way to help companies with AI regulation.
"If a new AI tool comes along, it needs to be certified, or it needs to be shown that it's compliant before your organization can use it," Licato said. "We're creating technology to help automate that process."
The venture was announced this summer, and the team is now focused on nurturing the enterprise. He plans to start slowly and first seek partners, federal funding and contracting opportunities while getting a handle on the business.
The startup unintentionally has been in preparation since Licato founded the lab in 2017 because the two entities' missions are aligned conceptually, he said. They both focus on improving reason in people and AI. The overlap is why Licato decided to pursue the commercial application.
"We just reached a point where we realized that a lot of the technology that we're creating is stuff that we could use to help people and turn into products that we could build a company around," Licato said.
The lab isn't focused on artificial reasoning, like improving the efficiency of robotic automation. It's interested in higher-level, cognitive human reasoning, like how the human brain generates thoughts involved in a conversation or argument. One example of the lab's work is a series of papers on psychometrics, which investigated psychological measurements.
"There's been a lot of work in how to reduce biased reasoning in humans, to make us less subject to the kind of reasoning that produces a lot of mistakes," Licato said. "And it turns out that a lot of the things that we use for people can also be used to help our artificially intelligent systems reason better and vice versa."
This niche is where Licato sees the potential to innovate. Organizations in health care, finance and defense will spend a significant amount of time writing, planning and thinking about compliance amid increasing regulations, Licato said. In November, President Joe Biden signed an executive order that set the first government mandates for AI.
As the AI industry spins faster, regulation and transparency will be critical to ensuring these products are transparent and compliant. The companies will need automated, efficient AI-based applications to certify their enterprises, he said.
"What's going to come out of that is companies that want to use AI tools, they're going to have to show that those tools meet certain regulatory requirements, and that's going to introduce a lot of overhead for a lot of organizations," Licato said.
