Project Grant 2602903

The National Science Foundation Office of Integrative Activities awarded Tuskegee University $699,999 on October 1, 2026, under the Integrative Activities program (CFDA 47.083) to develop trustworthy artificial intelligence systems for healthcare that balance clinical utility with accuracy, privacy, and accountability.

The project addresses hallucination, privacy breaches, and overconfident claims in large language models applied to healthcare by designing AI systems that tie clinical recommendations to validated medical evidence, minimize exposure of patient information to individual AI components, and engage clinicians during high-uncertainty or high-risk scenarios. The work comprises three integrated research thrusts. The first develops a clinical knowledge-grounded retrieval-augmented generation framework that structures validated medical sources as an evidence graph, optimizes query-specific subgraphs, constrains generation to high-confidence evidence paths, and provides provenance linking claims to sources. The second builds a compliance-focused large language model agent that audits and remediates data through redaction, generalization, or synthesis, paired with a compliance-aware orchestrator that constructs least-privilege task graphs for specialized agents. The third implements risk-aware uncertainty monitoring that routes selected outputs to clinicians for human review.

The award runs through September 30, 2029, with performance at Tuskegee, Alabama. Beyond the healthcare application, the research methods are intended to transfer to regulated fields such as law and finance. The project strengthens AI research and education at Tuskegee University, expands student opportunities, broadens participation in the national AI workforce, and shares resources with partner institutions and other historically Black colleges and universities.