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Alexa Fairness in AI call for proposals - fall 2021

Building AI for everyone

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About this CFP

Alexa AI-Natural Understanding’s (NU) mission is to build and enable engaging, world-class conversational AI capabilities that are broadly accessible. Under this call for proposals, we are seeking to fund research projects on the following topics:

  • Transparency, explainability, and accountability in AI systems
  • Theories of computational/algorithm fairness and factors that affect algorithmic trustworthiness
  • Detecting and ameliorating adverse biases in data and algorithms, and fairness-aware design of algorithms
  • Metrics and methods for designing, piloting, and evaluating systems that mitigate against adverse biases and ensure fairness, including the use of human-machine collaboration and decision support

Timeline

Submission period: August 16 - October 8, 2021
Decision letters will be sent out February 2022

Award details

Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:

  • Unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD on average
  • AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average
  • Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers

Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.

Eligibility requirements

Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the FAQ page.

Proposal requirements

PIs are encouraged to exemplify how their proposed techniques or research studies will apply to tasks in natural language understanding, natural language generation, speech and speaker recognition and/or computer vision. PIs should either include plans for open source contributions or state that they do not plan to make any open source contributions (data or code) under the proposed effort.

Proposals for this CFP should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 4 pages, not including Appendices.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the creativity and quality of the scientific content, and potential impact to the research community and society at large.

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.

Additional information

This CFP is funded bi-annually.

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