Building upon their recent groundbreaking research on large language model reasoning and retrieval, a CIIR team won second place in the Grounded Reasoning Cup competition. The CIIR team comprises PhD students Alireza Salemi and Chris Samarinas, advised by CIIR Associate Professor Hamed Zamani.
During the live competition, teams tackled real-world enterprise challenges using artificial intelligence agents. The event was sponsored by Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, and organized by Databricks. Participants showcased their work during the Data + AI Summit 2026 held in San Francisco on June 17, 2026.
For achieving second place, the CIIR team will receive a prize of $30,000 worth of Databricks AI Credits for their future groundbreaking research.
Along with the University of Massachusetts Amherst CIIR team, eleven other teams were selected to participate in this prestigious competition from Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, University of British Columbia, University of Chicago, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Washington, and Yale University.
