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John Licato, PhD is an Associate Professor at the USF Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity and Computing. He is Director of the USF Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning (AMHR) Lab, and founder/CEO of AI startup Actualization AI, Inc. He designed and teaches the natural language processing course (the field that created ChatGPT) at USF, and his lab's mission is to not only make AI smarter, but to use those advances to make people reason better as well. His research expertise lies in AI, NLP, human reasoning, cognitive modeling, and legal / regulatory reasoning, with over 100 peer-reviewed publications. He has been featured in outlets such as NPR's Marketplace Tech, ABC Action News, Forbes, and the Tampa Bay Business Journal.

Actualization.AI is a new startup founded by USF AI experts, developing solutions for contract analysis using hallucination-reducing AI. They were awarded an NSF SBIR award ($275K) and a Bull Ring Accelerator Grant ($25K) in August 2024 to develop their technology for automated and correct reasoning over rules and legal text, which resulted in the recent release of their SquarePact AI contract analysis tool. SquarePact analyzes any contract, learns about your specific needs and goals, and generates: (1) plausible scenarios you might encounter that this contract will affect, and (2) questions you can ask the other party or your lawyer to improve your position. That way, you are fully aware of how the contract will impact you, empowering you to make your own decisions about whether to accept. They are members of Embarc Collective, TiE Tampa, Tampa Bay Technology Incubator, and the Tampa Bay Wave 2025 Tech|X Accelerator.