IMFD Innovation Project obtains StartUp Science 2025 funding
The project "Intelligent assistant for the analysis of formal sources of law", with which the IMFD Innovation team proposes a tool for the management of legal sources used in Chile, won the StartUp Science 2025 fund, awarded by ANID.
"Thanks to the implementation of various projects in this area, as well as the interaction with various actors in the legal world, we are prepared to address a real problem that exists in the legal area," says Hernán Sarmiento, director of the IMFD Innovation area. Hernán Sarmiento, director of the IMFD Innovation area, points out. The StartUp Science funds seek to support the creation and growth of science-technology based companies, through co-financing, technical and business validation. "It is a competitive process, since in Chile we have a very powerful ecosystem that is seeking to advance the use of technologies in various areas of the country, so we are pleased to have this support that will allow us to bring the work being done at the Millennium Institute Fundamentals to Data even closer to a part of our society," emphasizes the director.
About the project: Fragmentation of legal sources of law
In the area of national law, there is a great dispersion of formal sources of information: for example, in sectors such as real estate law, the lack of centralization of relevant documents, such as building permits and municipal decrees, complicates the work of lawyers. This is repeated in all areas, and despite the existence of tools such as vLex or WestLaw that centralize documents and information from the legal sector, documents that are lower in the regulatory hierarchy have to be obtained and analyzed manually. This is one of the fundamental bases of the project: to bring value to data that, while available, is also dispersed. "Keeping legal sources of law up to date is demanding in terms of time and resources, especially for law firms. Having this information is vital for making informed decisions based on existing jurisprudence," explains the director.
Current tools, such as advances in the field of artificial intelligence, especially the processing of documents in multiple formats - an area in which the work of IMFD researchers stands out - or the irruption of Large Language Models (LMLM), allow the IMFD Innovation team to create and make available the implementation of an intelligent agent that searches and downloads legal documents, so that it can then learn from them. "This will enable search, reporting and querying tasks on these documents. Our intelligent agent will serve law firms and other companies as an efficient alternative to keep their information up to date and to carry out their workflows," highlights Sarmiento.
In the first stage, the project will focus on the area of real estate law, with the aim of validating the technology before scaling it to other areas and also to other countries in the region. "One of the critical points we face when working on projects applied to specific problems is that the models are developed in different contexts. This is why it is so important to be able to have developments adapted to the realities of each problem," emphasizes Hernán Sarmiento.
On the scientific side, we hope to introduce modern and advanced technologies in the legal sector in Chile, so that we can contribute to the country's legal security. We will implement intelligent agents that will take advantage of cutting-edge techniques such as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and explainability mechanisms, which will not only modernize the legal sector, but will also advance the state of the art in making intelligent agents know how to explain how they formulate an answer.
The IMFD Innovation area aims to promote the technology transfer of the research developed at the Millennium Institute Foundational Research on Data, to apply the most effective techniques, based on cutting-edge science and technology, seeking to extract value from data to enhance the development of Chile and the region, providing data solutions for industry, the public sector and society. Our differentiating feature is the ability to link scientific knowledge with engineering and development.