2023 Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Seed Grants

September 29, 2023: Funding updates have been distributed through email to the main PI on the project. Feel free to reach out to hai-grants@lists.stanford.edu with any questions.

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 approximately 25 grants, up to $75,000 each for a one-year period.

HAI and the Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine & Imaging (AIMI) are simultaneously offering a separate funding opportunity, a joint call for proposals up to $200,000 for two years. Additional guidance on which funding source is most appropriate for your project, and other frequently asked questions, can be found here. You cannot submit the same research for both opportunities; however, the review committee may forward proposals submitted for the HAI general call for consideration to the HAI-AIMI call.

Priority Areas

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 August 1, 2023 at 11:59pm PDT. Proposals will undergo a scientific review and an ethics and society review. Award recipients will be notified by late October. 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. Read more details about the ESR statement and process.
  • Detail the ethical challenges and possible negative societal impacts of the proposed research. What are the possible long-term consequences of this research? 
  • Articulate general principles that you will use to eliminate or mitigate these issues. Then, translate those principles into the specific design decisions you are making in your proposed research. 

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 and society review