Leadership & Collaboration
Forever Spoken is two founders with a built architecture and a defined research agenda. The scientific team is what we are assembling now, and this is the expertise we are looking for.
Current Team
Forever Spoken does not yet have a research team. Forming one, through this university and consultant outreach, is the purpose of this page. The current team is two people. What follows is precisely who they are, what they bring, and what is still being sought to complete the team an STTR reviewer expects to see. That is a normal and expected posture for a program built specifically to pair a small business with a research institution.
Co-Founder and Chief AI Officer
Dwayne Robinson co-founded Forever Spoken and serves as Chief AI Officer, leading the architecture, the research agenda, and the technical program. Principal Investigator designation depends on the university arrangement and the specific solicitation and has not been settled; it will be finalized with the university partner.
He holds an MS in Management Information Systems from Bowie State University and a BS in Computer Science from Long Island University, and is pursuing a PhD in Organizational Leadership at the University of Phoenix. In 2026 he completed AI Leadership: Strategy, Governance & Agentic Systems, a three-month executive intensive of the Harvard Data Science Initiative presented by Harvard Data Science Review. That program's focus on governance and agentic systems bears directly on the governance layer and the claim-level disposition logic in the proposed research. He also holds a MindStudio AI Certification in AI Agent Development & Deployment and brings 20+ years of executive leadership experience.
Co-Founder and Managing Partner
Crystal Smith co-founded Forever Spoken and serves as Managing Partner, leading business strategy, operations, partnerships, and commercialization. Over the past year she has worked directly on AI development and marketing for the company. She is also a national real estate investor and educator who has overseen more than $100 million in closed transactions since starting with a four-unit property in Chicago in 2004, and she founded Legacy Ladies by FORTRESS, an education and mentorship platform for women investors that she built and grew from the ground up. That combination, audience development and capital formation, is the commercialization capacity a Phase II path depends on.
Preliminary Work
Forever Spoken is not starting from a concept paper: the architecture is specified and working prototypes exist. What follows is what already exists, not what is proposed.
A Forever Spoken offering that implements the full four-layer identity stack framework as a working prototype, moving the architecture from a described design to an instantiated one. It remains a prototype, not production-hardened or independently validated, and no performance or scale figures are claimed.
A working interface prototype demonstrating provenance-first, human-in-the-loop review, including a pending-evidence queue and a confidence-weighted review panel: it is a prototype, not a deployed production system, with no usage statistics to report.
A defined four-layer architecture (on The Identity Stack) separates identity, expression, provenance, and fidelity, built out through four frameworks detailed on IP & Innovation: the Computational Fidelity Framework, Digital Identity Provenance Graph, Identity Fidelity Index, and Computational Memory Governance. It also treats an AI response as material claims, each evaluated on evidence provenance, source authority, corroboration, temporal relevance, perspective status, uncertainty, and disclosure authorization.
Dwayne Robinson co-founded and served as COO of GovFlex.com, 2014 to 2024, a multi-million-dollar marketplace using AI-powered matching, and founded and led VSTI, 1997 to 2012, serving the Federal Intelligence Community and Department of Defense, recognized as a Washington Technology Fast50 company in 2004 and 2005. Both involved hands-on work building and deploying LLM-based and agent-based systems, as does Agentalis AI, an AI proposal-automation venture he owns personally and which is not a Forever Spoken asset. He has also authored four practitioner and trade books on AI, agentic AI, and business.
What We're Seeking
Forever Spoken leads the architecture, the working prototypes, the governance model, the ethics posture, and federal proposal development. Those are in-house strengths, not gaps. What we are seeking is scientific validation capacity: the methodology, evaluation design, and human-subjects research that turn a working system into measured, publishable findings.
From a University Research Partner
Methodology
Research methodology design and scientific rigor for a fidelity and truthfulness study.
NLP & LLM Evaluation
NLP and LLM evaluation expertise, including benchmark construction and reproducible evaluation protocol design.
Human-Subjects Research
Human-subjects study design, instrument validation, and IRB review and administration, needed because perceived authenticity requires human evaluation.
Measurement Science
Measurement science: reliability, reproducibility, and inter-rater agreement for fidelity metrics.
Uncertainty
Uncertainty quantification, calibration, and abstention behavior in generative systems.
Graduate Research
Graduate researchers and a path to peer-reviewed publication.
From Independent Consultants
Independent consultants are also sought for research methodology and statistical analysis, and for evaluation and benchmark engineering.
Tell us about your department, lab, or program and how it connects to this work.
Staffing allocations, budget structure, and any matching commitments are worked out in conversation with a prospective partner, and discussed under confidentiality.
