University of Illinois Chicago

“University R&D funding is 'being increasingly threatened by puerile politics.' Given that Revolution Medicines (Third Rock, University of Illinois) and Moderna (Flagship Pioneering) both trace directly to academic research”

“ProGAL-VLA introduces a verification bottleneck that forces every action to be anchored to a specific, confirmed 3D entity before execution, yielding dramatic robustness gains and the first principled mechanism for robots to say 'I don't understand — please clarify.'”

“robot perturbation robustness jumps from 30.3% to 71.5%, and grounding failures drop from 41.2% to 6.3%”