UMBC CS PhD student Shubhashis Roy Dipta received a $20k Google Cloud research grant through the Gemini Academic Program to support his LLM agentic research in the final year of his PhD program. He is working with his advisor, Professor Francis Ferraro, to make Large Language Model-based systems more reliable. His dissertation research involves using reinforcement learning to address three areas where LLM-based systems currently fall short: complex multi-step reasoning, agentic LLMs and tool use, and multimodal AI systems using Vision-Language Models. He is currently spending his second summer in the Amazon Science (Alexa AI) division as an applied scientist intern.