ASKS Center Funding 2026-2027 Abstract

Start Date11/12/2025 Deadline Date12/8/2025

Abstract due November 21, 2025 midnight Central Time

The ASKS Center is calling for proposals for the second funding round, 2026-2027 academic year. In this phase, the center will support 3-5 sponsored projects. Each funded project will support a PhD research assistant and 2 weeks of summer salary for the principal investigators (PIs). Each selected project will then engage with research scientists from CapitalOne 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:

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) Safety:
    • LLM Reasoning
    • LLM Agents
    • AI Alignment
    • Synthetic Data Generation
    • LLM Security (e.g., Jailbreaking, Prompt Injection, Guardrail Models)
    • Hallucination Mitigation, LLM/VLM factuality
    • Multimodal Knowledge Representation
    • Knowledge Localization, Updating, and Editing
    • Unlearning (e.g., Debiasing through Unlearning Biases)
    • Structure-enhanced RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation)
    • Privacy Preservation
  • Knowledge Systems:
    • LLM-enhanced Information Extraction and Knowledge Graph Construction
    • Situation Understanding, Forecasting, and Reporting
  • CyberSecurity:
    • Agentic AI for Novel Attacks and Defenses
    • Multi-dimensional Anomaly Detection
    • LLM Explanation for Cybersecurity
    • Temporal-spatial Aware Foundation Models for Cybersecurity
    • Privacy-preserving Data Analytics

Specific information regarding the proposal topics can be found in the formal Call for Proposals: ASKS CFP

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

Stage 1 abstract submissions are due November 21, 2025, at midnight CDT to receive feedback from Capital One researchers.

Stage 2 full proposal submissions are due January 26, 2026, at midnight CDT. PIs who did not submit abstracts are still eligible to submit full proposals. The proposal should not exceed three pages, with unlimited references. PIs are encouraged to seek collaborations with research scientists at Capital One to prepare for proposals. Proposals will be evaluated by a collaborative advisory board composed of ASKS Leadership Team (excluding board members who submitted proposals) and Capital One scientists for their technical merits and innovations, topic relevance, potential to advance research in focus areas, and broader impacts.

Full Proposal Format: The proposal format is single-spaced, 11-point font or larger, with no less than 0.5-inch page 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 area of the proposal (per Call for Proposal process), title, PI(s), an executive summary, technical description of the project, expected deliverables/outcomes, milestones, and what plans exist for open sourcing data or results
  • List all university background IP (unlimited)
  • References (unlimited)
  • Requested budget (1 page max), use format shown in Section 7
  • Biographies of the PIs (up to 3 pages per PI in NSF Format)

Selection criteria: Successful projects will be evaluated based on their technical merits and innovations, topic relevance, potential to advance research in focus areas, and broader impacts.

Project period of performance: August 15, 2026–August 14, 2027.

Note that PIs who submitted a full proposal must be available to help review others’ proposals (as long as they don’t have conflicts of interest).

Eligibility

Full-time tenure-track, research-track, and teaching faculty members at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are eligible to submit proposals as PIs.

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
  • PIs who submitted a full proposal must be available to help review others’ proposals (as long as they don’t have conflicts of interest)