Imani Receives Air Force Young Investigator Program Award
Mahdi Imani, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University, has received an Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) award for research on AI reasoning and human-AI collaboration. The three-year, $450,000 award supports his project, “Foundations of Trust and Influence in Human-AI Teams: Identifiability, Causal Measurement, and Stability”.
The research focuses on how AI agents learn about people and use that knowledge to collaborate effectively. People can approach the same task with different beliefs, priorities, and expectations, which can change over time. AI agents need to recognize these differences and adapt their actions and communication accordingly. Imani’s team will develop mathematical foundations for AI agents that learn from human behavior and build models of teammates’ goals, beliefs, and trust. Combining machine learning with causal inference, the project will investigate how agents can update these models through interaction and use them to adapt their decisions and communication. The research will also examine how an agent’s behavior shapes human trust and cooperation, with the goal of establishing principles for AI systems that sustain effective collaboration with people over time.
The findings could guide the development of AI systems that collaborate with people and support reliable decision-making in complex, uncertain environments.