Lifu Huang Receives Inaugural Faculty Research Award from Intuit
Lifu Huang, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California, Davis, has received an Intuit Faculty Research Award in support of his foundational AI research. Huang is among the five inaugural recipients of the award.
The first awarding cycle was funded under a single call for proposals, “Foundational AI for Autonomous Decision Intelligence,” issued by Intuit in December 2025. The call drew a competitive pool of applicants from faculty across the nation who went through a structured, multi-stage review led by Intuit’s AI Science community panel, with responsible AI and ethics a formal part of the evaluation.
Huang’s project, titled “CAPA: Certified Adaptive Planning and Auditing for Trustworthy AI Agents,” aims to give AI agents a way to adapt mid-workflow and prove their plans are safe before acting.
“As AI agents take on increasingly complex, multi-step tasks across tools, documents, and human decision processes, trustworthiness needs to be built into the entire decision-making process rather than added as an afterthought,” Huang said. “With Intuit’s support, we aim to develop adaptive AI agents that can recognize when their assumptions no longer hold, plan within explicit policies and constraints and diagnose and repair failures — helping make AI-driven autonomy safer, more reliable and more auditable.”