CMU professor receives grant for innovative AI research
Assoc. Prof. Tim Rogalsky, CMU Mathematics, received a $150,000 Manitoba Solutions Grant from Research Manitoba to develop an ethical AI chatbot that will help people explore Manitoba’s history through the Manitoba Historical Society’s Historic Sites database.
Dr. Tim Rogalsky, Associate Professor of Mathematics at CMU, has received a Manitoba Solutions Grant for $150,000 over two years from Research Manitoba. It will fund a project titled, "Ethical AI for Manitoba: The MHS Agentic Chatbot Project," led by Rogalsky and his co-investigator Dr. Gordon Goldsborough of the Manitoba Historical Society (MHS).
Research Manitoba is investing more than $1.3 million in made-in-Manitoba artificial intelligence (AI) community-partnered research. Through the Manitoba Solutions Grant, seven projects across Manitoba are developing and applying AI tools that address challenges in healthcare, Indigenous innovation, social services, natural resources, and cultural preservation.
Rogalsky's project is a locally built, ethical AI chatbot that uses retrieval-augmented generation to improve how the public can access accurate, reliable information about Manitoba's history through the MHS's Historic Sites of Manitoba database. "New capabilities, such as showing connections among people, places, and events, or identifying nearby historic sites, will make Manitoba's heritage easier to explore," he says.
Goldsborough, MHS Acting Executive Director and Head Researcher, says "Manitoba's history belongs to all Manitobans. We've built a record of over 10,000 stories from the province's past. Now, for the first time, anyone who's curious will be able to ask a question and get a real answer, with a real source behind it."
Rogalsky designed the prototype while completing the University of Toronto's Certificate in AI this year. He will work with Goldsborough, Manitoba-based app developer Tichon Technologies, and research assistants to develop it. To their knowledge, this kind of heritage AI system does not exist so far anywhere else in Canada.
A key part of this project is hiring and training undergraduate students to be research assistants. Some will be coding and building the model in the first year, while others will be testing its responses and conducting ethical evaluations in the second year. These kinds of academic opportunities in post-secondary education are more commonly offered to graduate students than undergraduate students, so this project will give CMU students across disciplines invaluable experience.
Rogalsky's students are already working with AI tools in his classes, learning to build apps with a coding agent, and generating models in Mathematical Biology on the relationship between stage two diabetes and food security, for example.
A conscientious ethical approach is central to the MHS Agentic Chatbot Project. The AI model will run on a server located at CMU, rather than a distant data centre, meaning low environmental and financial impact beyond the footprint of CMU's existing IT infrastructure. "It also means the data is private and sovereign. Anyone who chats with this model knows that it's situated right here in Manitoba," Rogalsky says.
The chatbot will answer questions using only verified data from the Historic Sites of Manitoba database. Unlike commercial AI giants, it will be transparent about what it does and doesn't know, Rogalsky says. "Every response will include a citation, so users can trace the answer back to the source. When information is unavailable or uncertain, it will say so, rather than guess."
The project will employ at least six undergraduate research assistants who will be situated in Manitoba, invested in the local context and familiar with each other and the lead investigators. Diverse research assistants, such as Indigenous and international students, will each analyze content from their own perspectives.
The grant will fund a $25,000 AI server for the CMU IT department to create the infrastructure for the chatbot. "Technology at CMU has played an important role in the administration of the university and has had a growing role in the classroom in recent years," says Ryan Rempel, Director of Information Technology at CMU. "This new initiative adds a research component that the IT department is eager to explore."
When illustrating the importance of this project, Rogalsky references Empire of AI author Karen Hao, who compares large language models to transportation systems. "You have bicycles, which are excellent for active transportation and at very low cost of the environment. You have gas guzzling trucks that play an important role in the supply chain. Then you have rocket ships, which are ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini—the big frontier language models," he explains. But these rocket ships come at a massive cost to the environment and to human resources, so Hao says we need more bicycles. "This chatbot is a bicycle," Rogalsky says.
The MHS Agentic Chatbot's open-source model is designed to be replicated and adapted, with the hope that it can be a helpful tool for other cultural institutions and nonprofits across Manitoba in the future.