Five Weeks of Graduate School… and What’s Next

The last five weeks have been some of the busiest I’ve experienced in quite a while.

Between working during the day and taking two accelerated graduate courses in Artificial Intelligence, most evenings were spent building neural networks, implementing transformer architectures, studying trustworthy AI, and writing research papers instead of writing code for my own projects.

One project I’m particularly proud of is my latest research paper:

“Explainable and Agentic AI (XAI 2.0): Causal Traceability for Trustworthy Autonomous Systems.”

The paper explores a question I believe will become increasingly important over the next several years:

Traditional explainable AI focuses on answering “Why did the model make this prediction?” But autonomous AI agents require us to answer a different question: “Why did the agent choose this sequence of actions?”

The paper proposes a causal traceability framework for explaining multi-step autonomous decision making, discusses current research directions, and examines applications in healthcare, autonomous systems, and other safety-critical domains.

Research has always influenced how I build software, and this paper is no exception. Many of the architectural ideas I explore academically eventually find their way into the engineering projects I build professionally and personally.

With the summer semester ending this week, my attention now shifts back to one of my favorite long-term projects: Forge42Engine.

Development will resume next week with continued work on the battle engine, spell system, AI behaviors, and the underlying architecture powering Tharendell.

Sometimes progress means writing code.

Sometimes progress means spending five weeks learning enough to write better code.

This summer has definitely been the second kind.

I’m looking forward to getting back to building.

~ Babble Baz