Capital One and University of Illinois launch ASKS Center

Capital One and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are pleased to announce the launch of the Center for Generative AI Safety, Knowledge Systems and Cybersecurity (ASKS). ASKS has a mission focused on advancing the state of the art while addressing the challenges and opportunities of Generative Artificial Intelligence Models (GAIMs) in today’s quickly evolving world. Through research, education and the responsible advancement of these models across sectors and domains, the Center's will work to enhance the ability of GAIMs to manage real-time information while operating with strong performance accuracy and safety.

With this partnership, Capital One is providing a $3 million pledge over five years, which will provide support to selected faculty research projects and PhD students through fellowships focused on cutting-edge GAIM research. This support will be decided through an annual call for proposals that invites faculty to submit AI research proposals and nominate Ph.D. students. The support will be decided by a Center Advisory Board composed of both Capital One and U. of I. representatives.

In addition to Natarajan, primary contributors of this partnership include Heng Ji, Professor and Associate Director of Research at the Illinois Grainger College of Engineering Siebel School of Computing and Data Science in the and the Director of ASKS; Gang Wang, Illinois Professor of Computer Science Associate Director of ASKS; Milind Naphade, SVP of Capital One’s AI Foundations team; Sambit Sahu, Vice President in Capital One’s AI Foundations team; and Illinois computer science professors Jiawei Han, Bo Li, Gokhan Tur and Ling Ren.

The Capital One and Illinois ASKS Center builds on the long-standing innovation and science-focused partnership between both organizations. Since 2015, Capital One and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have partnered on the Capital One Tech Incubator Lab at Illinois, where students work on emerging AI and machine learning capabilities that will transform the financial services industry in partnership with Capital One’s applied researchers and experts.

“Large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in knowledge reasoning tasks. However, there is still a long way to go before we can rely on them as intelligent companions for complex problem-solving and decision-making. I'm incredibly excited and grateful to Dr. Prem Natarajan for launching an AI center dedicated to these critical research challenges and to Capital One for partnering to push the frontiers of AI research together with the University of Illinois,” said Heng Ji, Computer Science Professor and Director of ASKS.

The ASKS Center will host a symposium in the fall of 2025. The symposium will invite researchers to share leading insights in their respective areas of expertise. The coming together of both Capital One and Illinois’s leading experts will further advance the mission of the Center and uncover opportunities to expand on broader areas of academic and industry-specific research interests. The event will feature lightning talks from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Capital One scientists as well as roundtable discussions.

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