Agents
NSF funds VERITAS with $896K to create an 'AI Assurance Engineer' role that reviews agent autonomy before deployment
VERITAS (VERified Infrastructure for Trustworthy AI in Science), led by Anita Nikolich at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences, won a three-year, $896,000 NSF Cybersecurity Innovation for Cyberinfrastructure grant. Its most concrete output is a new staff role piloted at NCSA: an AI Assurance Engineer who reviews projects pre-deployment, scans for malicious behavior, checks software vulnerabilities and explicitly evaluates how much autonomy an agent has been granted. The project also standardizes model cards and dataset datasheets and builds training that teaches students to spot poisoned data and assess agent permissions — red-teaming practice arriving in scientific research computing.
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