Since its inception in 2015, Amazon Research Awards has issued calls for proposals in topics ranging from fairness in AI to robotics to natural-language processing. However, the spring 2023 call for proposal for Amazon Web Services AI: Generative AI offered a new focus area for this program, reflecting Amazon’s ongoing efforts to collaborate with researchers in this important area of research.
When announcing the CFP, Arash Nourian, AWS general manager, Machine Learning Engines, noted, "Generative AI has a great potential to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. However, it presents a number of challenges that should be addressed in order to realize its full potential, such as responsible use of these systems. At AWS, we think it is important to support the research community in addressing these challenges that could have a direct technological and societal impact."
The response was impressive, resulting in the highest number of submissions for a single ARA CFP topic since the program’s inception. Today, ARA is publicly announcing nine award recipients who represent eight universities in three countries. Proposals were reviewed for the quality of their scientific content and their potential to impact both the research community and society.
In addition, given the strong response and importance of the research, ARA plans to continue investing in generative AI in future CFPs.
“Amazon is thrilled to collaborate with academia to explore the frontiers of generative AI and advance its capabilities, usefulness, usability, and safe and responsible behavior towards broad societal adoption and transformative impact,” said Sudipta Sengupta, vice president and distinguished scientist in AWS Database & AI Leadership. “Our program aims to mitigate compute infrastructure cost and scale barriers for academia to participate in generative-AI research with a spectrum of timescales and outcomes.”
Recipients have access to more than 300 Amazon public datasets and can utilize AWS AI/ML services and tools through AWS Promotional Credits. Recipients also are assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice, along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.
Additionally, Amazon encourages the publication of research results, presentations of research at Amazon offices worldwide, and the release of related code under open-source licenses.
ARA funds proposals throughout the year in a variety of research areas. Applicants are encouraged to visit the ARA call for proposals page for more information or send an email to be notified of future open calls.
The table below lists, in alphabetical order, the spring 2023 cycle call-for-proposal recipients.
| Recipient | University | Research title |
| Chitta Baral | Arizona State University | Ensuring logical robustness in generative natural-language systems |
| Muhao Chen | University of California, Davis | Robust (controlled) natural-language generation with structure‐aware equivariance learning |
| Jia Deng | Princeton University | Language-guided procedural generation of 3D scenes |
| Elena Glassman | Harvard University | Making sense of language model outputs for end-user tasks |
| Carlos Guestrin | Stanford University | Alpaca farm: an open framework for language-model-safety research and development |
| Tatsunori Hashimoto | Stanford University | Alpaca farm: an open framework for language-model-safety research and development |
| Jonathan Kummerfeld | University Of Sydney | Making sense of language model outputs for end-user tasks |
| Ali Mesbah | University Of British Columbia | Reducing hallucinations: contextual strategies for code generation in large language models |
| Maarten Sap | Carnegie Mellon University | RLKF: mitigating factual hallucinations and social biases with knowledge-based reinforcement learning |
