NSF To Fund Professor Bill Basener’s Research on AI and Threat Detection

UVA’s School of Data Science is pleased to announce that the National Science Foundation has agreed to fund Professor Bill Basener’s research on the potential of artificial intelligence to detect threats—work that could have implications on everything from the impact of severe weather to the significance of industrial activity and military movements.

Basener’s project will examine how next-generation, deep learning AI models can be used to replicate human reasoning with machine reasoning to reach previously unattainable levels of understanding across a wide range of threats.

Currently, aircraft and satellite sensors collect more data than humans can examine. While existing AI systems can process this data, they do so separately and without considering the context, location, and time of the situation being analyzed. Basener’s work will look at how Large Language Models can be used to bridge this gap through machine reasoning that takes into account a variety of data sources while also applying critical elements of human reasoning.

Basener holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Marist College, as well as a Ph.D in Mathematics from Boston University. He has previously authored research publications on machine learning, image processing, as well as in many other fields.