AICE Center Funding 2025-2026

Start Date3/21/2025 Deadline Date4/15/2025

Full Proposals due April 15, 2025 midnight Central Time

The AICE Center is calling for proposals for the third funding round, 2025-2026 academic year. In this phase, the center will support 3+ research projects. Each funding project will support a PhD research assistant and 2-4 weeks of summer salary for principal investigators (PIs). Each selected project will then engage with research scientists from Amazon to collaborate and jointly advise PhD students.

Topics of interest would include but are not limited to those below. Please feel free to bring your unique viewpoint and expertise to these topics:

  1. Foundation Model Improvements
    • Novel model architectures
    • Novel training algorithms and methodologies
    • Multi-modal (e.g., text, image, video, audio) understanding and generation
    • Multi-lingual understanding and generation
    • Algorithms and workflows for acquiring and curating high-quality and diverse datasets for training
  2. Foundation Model Evaluation
    • Creation of new benchmarks for assessing foundation model capabilities
    • Methodologies for robust evaluation of generative AI systems, including agents
  3. Efficient Generative AI
    • Efficient training and inference for cloud and on-device applications
    • Compute and memory efficient handling of multi-modal long/infinite context
    • Improving efficiency of diffusion models, including discrete diffusion
  4. Reasoning
    • Commonsense and domain-specific (e.g., math, coding) reasoning
    • Temporal and spatial reasoning
    • Reasoning for planning
  5. Knowledge Grounding
    • Approaches to ground (multi-modal) generation on up-to-date world, domain-specific, enterprise, or personal knowledge
    • Memory-augmented generative AI systems
  6. Agentic AI
    • Creation of autonomous systems capable of performing tasks, making decisions, and interacting with their environments
    • Multi-Agent systems and agent orchestration framework improvements
    • Customization and continual improvement of agents post deployment
    • Internationalizing agentic systems
  7. Responsible Generative AI
    • Red teaming (e.g., advanced red teaming approaches, automated red teaming for multi-modal models)
    • Improvement of foundation model RAI performance (e.g., robustness to jailbreaking and membership inference attacks; watermarking approaches; deepfake detection)
    • Responsible agentic AI (e.g., robustness of multi-agent systems, adherence to guardrails)
  8. Applications of Generative AI
    • Systems that leverage Generative AI for advancing science and technology in areas such as physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, hardware design, materials science, engineering, economics, healthcare, climate.

Specific information regarding the proposal topics can be found in the formal Call for Proposals: AICE Call for Proposals 2025-2026

Submissions should not reference either Amazon or Alexa, nor speculate about how the research might be applied to current or future Amazon products, services, business models or needs. Proposals should focus on the science.

Multi-submissions will need to fill out multiple applications.

Full Proposal Format: The proposal format is single-spaced, 11-point font or larger, with no less than 0.5-inch margins. The proposal should include the following content:

  • Full names and email addresses of all PIs involved.
  • Project description (3 pages max), including the focus topic area of proposal, title, an executive summary, technical description of the project, expected deliverables/outcomes, milestones and what plans exist for open sourcing of data or results.
  • List of all university background IP (unlimited)
  • References (unlimited)
  • Requested budget (1 page max), use format shown in Section 7 of the CFP (linked above)
  • Biographies of the PIs (up to 3 pages per PI in NSF Format)

Eligibility

Full-time tenure-track, research-track and teaching faculty members at Illinois are eligible to submit proposals as PIs. Note: Faculty members that will be Amazon Scholars in AY 2025-2026 are eligible to submit proposals but must adhere to the university conflict of interest policies and procedures.

PI Requirements

  • PI with work with department business office to complete a budget table.
  • The PI and his/her unit are fully responsible for any overages if the funding request is calculated incorrectly
  • The PI is responsible for consulting with the relevant offices and meeting all requirements