Richa Verma

Richa Verma

Applied Scientist

About

Richa Verma is an Applied Scientist at Microsoft with over 9 years of experience in Artificial Intelligence, specializing in Reinforcement Learning (RL), Large Language Models (LLMs), Agentic AI, and AI Engineering. She currently works on building production-grade AI systems, with a focus on intelligent query understanding, agent orchestration, evaluation, and designing scalable AI workflows for enterprise applications. She has a background in ML research with several publications at top-tier international conferences along with multiple patents.

In this live hack session, we will build an ontology-grounded AI agent and use the ontology as the symbolic backbone of its world model. Starting with a conventional prompt-driven agent, we will progressively enable it to ground ambiguous requests, traverse domain relationships, select compatible tools, simulate candidate state transitions, and validate proposed actions before execution.
Built entirely with open-source technologies such as RDF, OWL, SHACL, RDFLib, pySHACL, LangGraph, and a locally hosted language model, the session will give attendees a reusable architecture for moving beyond agents that merely generate plausible actions toward agents that can explain what they understand, why an action is valid, and what is expected to happen next.
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