Project Grant Award Summary

Case Western Reserve University has received a $600,000 Project Grant from the National Science Foundation's Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure under the Computer and Information Science and Engineering program (CFDA 47.070), effective August 1, 2026 through July 31, 2029. The FORTEFAI (Trustworthy AI Cyberinfrastructure for Guardrailing Multimodal Foundation Models) project develops open-source, production-ready software designed to enhance the reliability and trustworthiness of artificial intelligence systems used in scientific computing and cyberinfrastructure. The core deliverable is FORTE (Finding Outliers with Representation Typicality Estimation), a model-agnostic methodology that detects distributional anomalies and out-of-distribution inputs by quantifying how closely data inputs align with the representation manifold of trusted training data.

The project integrates FORTE into three coordinated software components: FORTEFAI Vision for scientific image quality assurance and out-of-distribution detection; FORTEFAI Text for large language model guardrails, hallucination detection, and prompt-injection monitoring; and FORTEFAI Log for anomaly detection in high-performance computing operations. By identifying unreliable inputs before they propagate through downstream analyses, these tools address the challenge of foundation models that often fail silently when confronted with data distributions differing from their training sets, thereby improving the robustness, reproducibility, and trustworthiness of AI-enabled scientific discovery across vision, language, and cyberinfrastructure domains.