IncQuery partners with UCLA’s IPAM to advance automated survey verification

CHICAGO, Sept. 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE)—IncQuery, the end-to-end research partner for consulting and investment firms, today announced the completion of a sponsored research project with UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) focused on automated verification of complex survey logic. Through IPAM’s 2026 Research in Industrial Projects for Students (RIPS) program, a four-student team explored whether formal verification, a mathematical method used in software engineering to check whether a system behaves according to defined rules, could help detect survey logic problems before a survey goes live.

As surveys grow more complex, manually checking every possible respondent path becomes more difficult. A hidden logic error can disrupt that path or prevent the survey from functioning as intended. IncQuery brought that challenge to the 2026 RIPS program, where a four-student research team spent the summer exploring whether those failures could be identified mathematically before fielding. IncQuery participated in the 2026 RIPS-LA program alongside sponsors including NASA, OpenAI, AMD, RTX and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

“Survey research is increasingly supporting decisions where teams need to be able to stand behind every piece of evidence, but the complexity behind that research continues to grow,” said Felipe Ochoa, CEO of IncQuery. “We saw an opportunity to bring a genuinely difficult problem from our platform to a group of talented researchers and ask a fundamental question: Can we build a more rigorous way to verify complex survey logic before a survey ever reaches a respondent? The work this team has done gives us valuable new thinking about what that future could look like.”

The project, “Automated Verification of Survey Logic,” was conducted by Karma Brame of Howard University, Ziyao “Jade” Jiao of Pomona College, Bao Truong of Emory University and Jelizaveta Tsalaja of Bates College. The team worked with academic mentor London Bielicke and IncQuery industry mentors Felipe Ochoa and Kelly Mazur. The project was jointly supported by IncQuery and NSF Grant DMS-2422832.

The researchers used IncQuery’s domain-specific survey language as a starting point for mathematically representing survey behavior. They then evaluated whether survey paths could satisfy key requirements, including whether respondents could reach the appropriate questions and whether quota conditions could be met.

The team developed a working verification framework and tested it across a range of survey behaviors. The research will help inform IncQuery’s continued exploration of automated checks that can identify survey issues before fielding begins.

“Speed matters enormously to the teams we work with, but speed only creates value if the research remains sound,” Ochoa continued. “We believe the next generation of research technology should help teams move quickly while giving them greater confidence in what sits underneath the final analysis. Collaborations like RIPS allow us to explore technically ambitious ideas that can move the industry toward that goal.”

Hosted by IPAM at UCLA, the RIPS program brings together undergraduate students to work in teams on real-world research problems proposed by industry and public-sector sponsors. Students work alongside academic and industry mentors before presenting their research findings at the conclusion of the summer program. The 2026 Los Angeles program ran from June 22 through August 21.