ASKS Center Funding 2025-2026

Start Date4/1/2025 Deadline Date5/24/2025

Full Proposals due May 24, 2025 midnight Central Time

The ASKS Center is calling for proposals for the third funding round, 2025-2026 academic year. In this phase, the center will support 3-5 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 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:
    • Multimodal knowledge representation
    • Knowledge localization, updating and editing
    • Hallucination Mitigation
    • Debiasing and Unlearning
    • Misinformation Detection, Fact Checking, Factual Error Correction
    • LLM Reasoning, System 2 Thinking
    • Theme-based and structure-enhanced RAG (retrieval augmented generation)
    • LLM agents
    • Creative Intelligence
    • Privacy Preservation
    • Guardrail models and agents
    • Synthetic Data Generation
    • Human-Model Alignment
    • Jailbreaking, prompt injection, and their defenses
    • Inference attacks, extraction attacks, and their defense
  • Knowledge Systems:
    • Open-domain Never-Ending Knowledge Extraction, Discovery and Acquisition
    • Knowledge base construction and operation
    • Anomaly Event Detection
    • Situation Understanding, Forecasting and Reporting
    • LLM-enhanced information extraction and knowledge graph construction
  • CyberSecurity:
    • Multi-dimensional anomaly detection
    • LLM for Explanation
    • Time Series Data Mining
    • Temporal Spatial Aware Foundation Models
    • AI 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 CapitalOne, nor speculate about how the research might be applied to current or future CapitalOne products, services, business models or needs. Proposals should focus on 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.

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