Building Ontology Guardrails for Agentic AI - workshop at Compass AI & Tech Summit
Overview:
In this 90 minute hands-on session, you’ll build the guardrail layer from the keynote with your own hands — no prior knowledge of ontologies required, just the ability to read and edit a little code. Working in a browser-based notebook (nothing to install), you’ll start by writing simple triples to model a real business domain, then declare RDFS and OWL relationships and watch a reasoner infer facts you never explicitly stated. From there you’ll turn to SHACL, the constraint language that does the opposite job — enforcing rules and rejecting data that violates them — and you’ll write your own shape that catches a bad, plausible-looking action before it slips through. You’ll leave understanding, concretely, why probabilistic models need a logical layer outside them, and how the pieces — triples, inference, and validation — fit together into a working guardrail. Time permitting, we’ll close by dropping one of your SHACL shapes into a live agentic loop, so you can see the guardrail stop a bad tool call in real time — and take the notebook home to keep building.
About the workshop holder:
Frank Coyle, PhD, is a computer scientist and educator whose work bridges neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. His path into AI began in the neuroscience program at Emory University — dissecting brains alongside medical students and studying the neurophysiology of the visual system — before he turned to computer science, earning graduate degrees at Georgia Tech and a PhD from Southern Methodist University. That cross-disciplinary foundation shapes how he thinks about today’s AI: not as algorithms in isolation, but as architectures whose behavior, like the brain’s, emerges from structure. After 32 years as a professor at SMU, where he taught across nearly every corner of computer science, he retired to focus on the technologies reshaping the field.
He now teaches generative AI and large language models at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a visiting professorship at the University of Bologna’s graduate school of business. He is also the founder of Edge AI (codesupreme.ai), where he develops courses and tools that help working developers build reliable, production-grade agentic systems. Known for making difficult technical ideas clear and memorable, Frank teaches audiences ranging from Berkeley graduate students to district attorneys and formerly incarcerated learners — and, most recently, the 250,000+ viewers of his AI Engineer World’s Fair talk on why agentic systems need ontologies.
Please take under consideration your application, as the places of the workshop are limited. If you cannot make it to come, please select the 'not going' option, so that others can join.