A University of Alabama at Birmingham assistant professor was recently awarded a $2.6 million grant to develop Artificial Intelligence language programming.

Dr. Thomas Gilray of the Department of Computer Science won the grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a unified, full-stack foundation for expressive rules-based programming to be used for various AI languages.

“We’re very excited to receive this award,” Gilray said. “It has required a lot of progress to get us to this point, and the award will enable us to develop open-source tools, programming languages, and frameworks capable of enabling truly scalable reasoning for users across disciplines and to explore our framework’s full potential.

“The goal of this project is to enable someone with domain-specific medical knowledge, for example, to write sophisticated queries for, and analyses of, medical databases and get back efficient responses without needing to be a computing expert, or even a programmer. We are excited to be collaborating with PMI on applications to precision medicine.”

According to Gilray, the money will aid around a dozen students and several investigators.

“The grant will support roughly 12 doctoral students and seven principal investigators for its duration and will help us to foster a closer collaborative relationship with our partners at other universities,” he said.

Austen Shipley is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News.