New ARPA-H and ARO Research Awards

Despite all the drama with funding at the federal level, I’m fortunate to have received not one, but two new research funding awards recently.

The first comes from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), the Department of Health and Human Services’s in-house innovator (basically DARPA for health). The Platform Accelerating Rural Access to to Distributed and Integrated Medical Care (PARADIGM) program seeks to improve healthcare outcomes for rural Americans by providing hospital-level care on-site (such as at people’s homes or town centers) via a mobile care delivery platform (CDP – think a mobile clinic in a smart van).

Our team is called VIGIL: Vectors of Intelligent Guidance in Long-Reach Rural Healthcare (like ARPA-H we play a little fast and loose with acronyms). We are part of a large team led by Prof. Jason Corso at the University of Michigan, and our role is to develop AI-powered task guidance technology that can upskill a local health practitioner to provide certain hospital level procedures via dynamic multimodal guidance.

The other award I received comes from the Army Research Office Knowledge Systems Program and is called Modeling Causality in AI Through Embodiment and Analogy, and we seek to imbue LLMs with correct and verifiable physical causal reasoning properties by sourcing high-fidelity physical knowledge from embodied simulation environments (Unity) in problem-solving scenarios. This follows on previous work funded by ARO, an NSF EAGER grant from 2020-2022, and work done in my Ph.D. and postdoc.

Delighted to have received this funding, especially at this time!

(X-posted on nikhilkrishnaswamy.com)