SBIR-STTR Award

Explainable AI to support Veterans Transition Assistance Programs (XAI-VTAP)
Award last edited on: 7/18/2018

Sponsored Program
SBIR
Awarding Agency
DOD : DARPA
Total Award Amount
$1,647,534
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
SB163-007
Principal Investigator
Scott Lathrop

Company Information

Soar Technology Inc (AKA: SoarTech)

3600 Green Court Suite 600
Ann Arbor, MI 48105
   (734) 627-8072
   info@soartech.com
   www.soartech.com
Location: Multiple
Congr. District: 12
County: Washtenaw

Phase I

Contract Number: D17PC00121
Start Date: 3/14/2017    Completed: 4/16/2018
Phase I year
2017
Phase I Amount
$148,350
This work will investigate Explainable Artificial Intelligence to support employment recommendation systems for veterans. Current job recommendation systems for veterans rely on boolean key-word search methods and do not employ state of the art machine l...

Phase II

Contract Number: 140D6318C0053
Start Date: 6/5/2018    Completed: 7/31/2021
Phase II year
2018
Phase II Amount
$1,499,184
A challenge for Artificial Intelligence recommenders is explaining their reasoning to users. Humans tend to explain concepts with symbolic narratives, which contrasts the way non-symbolic machine learning represents concepts. This research addresses this challenge by grounding the research in the problem of helping transitioning veterans find relevant careers. The developed prototype will provide job recommendations emerging from a Long Short-Term Memory trained on word embeddings derived from 1.73 million job descriptions and 70,000 resumes. Explanations of matches are grounded in selected text segments, or StoryGraph elements, from an individuals resume with a skill decomposition graph providing additional clarification. By grounding the explanation, veterans will be able to understand causal relationships between resumes and job descriptions. The proposed second phase will investigate conceptual explanation through hierarchical learning and the potential for attention-based neural networks to improve the matching and semantic explanations. We will also extend the StoryGraph to provide insights into career path trajectories and create an interactive interface for veterans to gain deeper insights and explore hypotheticals. We propose an option task to explore generalizability by extending it to the medical domain to help match doctors and patients.