Research

See the activities in the two labs I direct, the AI & NLP Lab and the Quantum AI Lab, for more details.

Research Area

Quantum AI (QAI) and Natural Language Processing (QNLP)

The main focus of my QAI and Q-NLP work is related to enabling hybrid classical/quantum computing for AI.

See:

The Complex Bidirectional Inducer for Representation Dynamics (CBIRD) is a Language Model trained to be a fully hybrid classical/quantum model, which can be used on CPU/GPU and QPU systems without encoding loss, usable as a state-of-the-art text diffusion model, as a BERT-style bidirectional encoder-only model, etc. - code and model coming soon…
I launched the environment for Natural Language Qu Kit (NLQK), a Quantum AI library - GitHub repo, PyPi project, website together with the Quantum AI Lab team.
Quantum AI Lab

Knowledge Graph Extraction, AIs, KnowledgeRAGs, and OntologyRAGs

More on my AI & NLP Lab pages

With applications to Public Health, Medical Applications, National Security, Legal, Education:

LLMs, Knowledge Graphs, Ontologies in complex AI systems
- Social Media data analysis for drug use and abuse, adverse reactions, in cooperation with Danny Valdez and Maria Parker from the IU School of Public Health
- National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) Drugs A-Z Ontology, in cooperation with Danny Valdez and Maria Parker from the IU School of Public Health
- Smart Recovery: Geospatial and AI Tools for Public Health Interventions - a cooperation with the Dove Recovery House and IU Center for Rural Engagement
Multi-Agent Models with Logic and Reasoning RAGs
Knowledge Graphs from unstructured data and common sense reasoning, Temporal Graph Neural Networks

Competitions and Challenges

Second Phase of the US Navy AINet ANTX AI Prize Challenge 2021, joint work with postdoc Anthony Meyer and CL MS student Billy Dickson, see on Sam.gov
Veteran Affairs AI Tech Sprint 2024, Finalists in a competition to process medical reports (April to May, 2024), joint work with PhD-student Billy Dickson.
2nd Annual Crane IP Defense Innovation Pitch Competition. Winner of the competition (June 2023)
Fellow of the National Security Innovations Network (NSIN). Defense Innovations Accelerator 2021: work on AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Data Science, large systems software engineering, high-performance/high-accuracy cloud, on-premises, and edge computing: technology for data and text pre-processing to enable and speed up the generation of results for Data Scientists and Analysts who are confronted with time-consuming and costly data processing.

European Union Funded Grants

KG4J – Knowledge Graphs for Justice (2026-2030), funded by the Belgian Science Policy Office (BELSPO)’s Policy for Science (P4Science), in cooperation with P. Jeuniaux, Nationaal Instituut voor Criminalistiek en Criminologie/Institut National de Criminalistique et de Criminologie, Brussels, Belgium.
Multinational Collaborative EU Project: ATLAS - (Applied Technology for Language-Aided CMS), start April 2010, technologies Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation (Croatian to other EU languages), Document Processing and Analysis.
“Hrvatska jezična mrežna riznica” – “Online Repository for Croatian” funded 2005 by the Croatian Ministry of Science. Project #: 0212010; PI: Dr. Dunja Brozović Rončević (Institute for Croatian Language and Linguistics, Zagreb, Croatia), Co-Principle Investigator: Damir Cavar, work on digital online resources for Croatian, Machine Learning corpora, speech, and language processing technologies.

USA Funded Grants

Quantum-Natural Language Processing (QNLP) and Quantum Machine Learning (QML) funded by the Center for Quantum Technologies (CQT) for 2024-2025, Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar. See more outcomes at Quantum AI Lab.
The Governance of Middle Market Firms (Focus Area: Governance & Finance), funded in 2017 by the National Center for the Middle Market; joint project with Matthew Josefy from the Kelley School of Business and Damir Cavar. AI and Natural Language Processing, Mapping of Knowledge Graphs data from SEC quarterly reports.

National Science Foundation Funding

Collaborative Research: Automatically Annotated Repository of Digital Video and Audio Resources Community (AARDVARC). Award Number: 1519887; Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar; Organization: Indiana University; NSF Organization: BCS; Start Date: 09/01/2014. (Abstract)
MultiTree: Completing the Library of Language Relationships. Award Number: 1519050; Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar, Organization: Indiana University, NSF Organization: BCS, Start Date: 08/01/2014. (Abstract)
19th Lexical-Functional Grammar Conference (LFG). Award Number: 1362098. Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar, Co-Principal Investigator: Malgorzata Cavar; Organization: Eastern Michigan University. NSF Organization: BCS, Start Date: 03/01/2014. (Abstract)
Collaborative Research: Automatically Annotated Repository of Digital Video and Audio Resources Community (AARDVARC), Award Number: 1244713, Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar, Organization: Eastern Michigan University, NSF Organization: BCS, Start Date: 09/15/2012. (Abstract)
MultiTree: Completing the Library of Language Relationships, Award Number: 1227106, Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar, Organization: Eastern Michigan University, NSF Organization: BCS, Start Date: 07/01/2012. (Abstract)
Northern Caddoan Languages Documentation Project, Award Number: 0421838, Principal Investigator: Douglas R. Parks, Co-Principal Investigator: Damir Cavar, Organization: Indiana University, NSFOrganization: BCS, Start Date: 07/15/2004. (Abstract)

National Institute of Health Funding

Identifying Recovery Insights through Signal Extraction (iRISE): Leveraging Machine Learning Strategies to Predict Disengagement from Recovery Communities. Co-PI Damir Cavar, PI Danny Valdez, Project period: Jul 01, 2026 - Jun 30, 2028, Sponsor: NIH-NIDA.

National Institute of Justice Funding

Local Institutional Grants

Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study Summer Followship 2025, research on Quantum and Complex Embeddings for AI and LLM architectures that are usable in hybrid classical and quantum computing environments.
Indiana University Bloomington Conference Grant for the Quantum AI and NLP 2025 Conference, July 2025.
IU Global CLIP Fellowship Fall 2024 (Global Client Projects program), collaboration with the National Institute of Criminalistics and Criminology (INCC), Brussels, Belgium and a team working on advertisement and AI tools for advetrisement classification.
Indiana University Institute for Advanced Study grant for research on “Deep Natural Language Analysis of Corporate Disclosures” in 2017. A joint grant with Dr. Matt Josefy from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.
Indiana University Grant-In-Aid Program, 2016, “AI-based anti-Semitism Detection in Social Media,” joint grant with Guenther Jikeli, Jewish Studies, Indiana University

Older Projects

Complex Linguistic Constructions and Large Language Models: Ellipsis, Long Distance Dependencies, Discontinuities
The Hoosier Ellipsis Corpus (THEC) (GitHub repo)
TIE-ML - Temporal Information and Event Annotation (GitHub repo)
Knowledge Graphs from unstructured data and common sense reasoning