2021 Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Seed Grants

HAI seed grant decisions were sent through email to the main PI on the proposal on September 30, 2021. 

Call for HAI Seed Grant Proposals

The Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence’s vision for the future is led by the commitment to promote human-centered uses of AI, design for it using human-centered methods, and ensure that humanity benefits from the technology and that the benefits are broadly shared. Along these lines, we seek proposals that support new, ambitious, and speculative ideas with the objective of getting initial results. We welcome proposals from the whole array of humanistic, social scientific, natural scientific, biomedical, and engineering approaches, including critical, historical, ethnographic, clinical, experimental, and inventive work from discrete studies to research for book publications to speaker series to system building and evaluation. We especially aim to fund collaborations of faculty and students whose work bridges two or more disciplines and proposals that can make a persuasive case that these initial results will catalyze further support from internal and external stakeholders. We expect to award 20-30 grants, up to $75,000 each for a one year period.

Simultaneously, HAI and the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Medical Imaging (AIMI) are partnering to offer an alternative funding opportunity for research that is healthcare related and has already moved beyond initial results and requires more resources than offered through this seed grant. You may find additional guidance on which call to apply for, and other frequently asked questions here. 

In addition to the above criteria, preference will be given to high-impact projects that align with the three broad HAI research areas:

• Intelligence — research that aims to develop novel technologies inspired by the depth and versatility of human intelligence. Potential topics may include  AI inspired by neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology; novel unsupervised, semi-supervised, self-supervised, and supervised learning methods for diverse data types; knowledge and semantics.
• Augment Human Capabilities — research that aims to design and create AI technologies that augment humans rather than replace them. Potential topics/domains may include AI and human-computer interaction; health, medicine, and wellness; robotics and automation; sustainability and climate change; education, law.
• Human Impact — research that aims to understand and guide the global societal impact of AI technologies for the greater good. Potential topics may include the impact of AI on economics, society, government, law, ethics, philosophy, policy, and other related areas of the social sciences and humanities. This may include race, ethnicity, and gender studies; interpretable, trustworthy, and fair AI; the intellectual and conceptual foundations of AI, its history, and its cultural impact.

Submission Guidelines

Proposals are due on June 23, 2021 at 11:59pm PST. Proposals will go through a scientific review and an ethics review. Award recipients will be notified in September. Please submit using the Apply button on this webpage. 

The proposal (no longer than 3 pages, excluding references, PDF, single-spaced, 11 point, 1 inch margins) should include the following components:

First two pages:

• Background and problem statement
  • Core research idea
  • How your research idea innovates over existing methods/applications or brings together diverse disciplines
• Detailed technical (or general) problem solving approach 
• Team involved (faculty, postdocs, staff, and/or students as appropriate)
• Requested funding and associated sketch budget (e.g., “25% RA 2qtrs: $18K; fieldwork travel $3K, equipment: $4K”, 8% infrastructure charge)

Third page:

• Ethics and Society Review (ESR) statement: (one page PDF, single-spaced, 11 point, 1 inch margins). The ESR panel may ask for more detail in response.
  • Detail the ethical and societal risks of the proposed research, the principles that researchers in your field should follow in mitigating these risks, and how, specifically, you plan to use those principles to mitigate the risks in your research design. The ESR is focused on ethics and societal harms, in contrast to the IRB's focus on harms to research participants. Read here for examples of common risks, principles, and mitigations in HAI ESR statements.

Fourth page + 

• References (no max or min limits, at the end of the PDF file)

Selection Criteria

HAI will review proposals based on:

• Likelihood to make a positive impact on our planet, our nations, our communities, our families and/or our lives
• Novelty or innovation in the application, development or study of AI 
• Whether the proposed team has the proper credentials to complete the project
• Involving multiple disciplines 
• Intellectual merit of the proposal, balanced with quality and creativity
• Alignment with the Priority Areas listed above
• Recommendations from the ethics review