David de Hilster, a professor at Northeastern’s College of Engineering, envisions an AI ecosystem driven not by statistical guesswork but by logic, rules, and transparency. This fall, students at Northeastern University’s Miami campus will have the chance to join a new club aimed at designing and building decentralized AI systems leveraging blockchain technology and a programming language called NLP++. Open to all students, this club is being launched by David de Hilster, an engineering professor and experienced computer language developer. It will act as a collaborative center for students interested in AI, language, and distributed systems, focusing on creating the foundational framework needed to integrate de Hilster’s logic-based programming language into the blockchain. De Hilster hopes to establish an AI ecosystem governed by logic, rules, and transparency rather than statistical inference. “The goal is to build an open, decentralized ecosystem for the development, maintenance, and use of linguistic resources—covering every human language and topical domain, ” de Hilster explains. “Without the blockchain, NLP++ is a standalone programming language. With the blockchain, NLP++ can harness dictionaries, knowledge, and algorithms that operate at human-level capability in a trustworthy way. ” A blockchain is a decentralized, distributed ledger technology storing transaction records across multiple computer systems, forming the foundation for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. About 25 years ago, de Hilster began creating a method for computers to analyze and interpret text in the way humans think, resulting in the programming language Natural Language Processing ++ (NLP++), which he co-developed. He suggests NLP++ might one day power digital assistants using logic and rule-based reasoning to answer questions—representing a significant shift from the probability-based models underlying today’s popular chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. While NLP++ provides the foundational technology, high-quality data remains crucial to building AI-based systems. Gathering such data manually, collaboratively, and transparently is challenging—this is where blockchain technology becomes valuable. One key advantage of blockchain, de Hilster notes, is its lack of control or ownership by any single private entity.

Its decentralized structure ensures transparency and open access to all linguistic resources created on the NLP++ platform. “The concept is that when individuals write algorithms—for example, an intelligent agent focused on sports—and encode it in NLP++ on the blockchain, others can freely use it, ” he says. Looking ahead, de Hilster and his team plan to introduce an NLP coin to financially reward contributors who develop and maintain these linguistic resources. Though the club will begin designing the system this fall, fully integrating NLP++ with blockchain technology will likely require several years. However, de Hilster believes the long-term impact could be revolutionary. In contrast to ChatGPT and similar tools, a digital assistant built on NLP++ would avoid relying on enormous datasets and probabilistic models to produce answers. Instead, it would utilize a structured, blockchain-hosted set of rules and logic—reasoning more like a human than predicting like a machine. “Our aim is trustworthy natural language processing, which means doing it as humans do—without probabilities derived from reading vast amounts of text, ” de Hilster says. “Humans apply rules. Given 100 English sentences, every English speaker can identify which are correct and which aren’t. ”