The AI Center of Excellence is excited to announce the call for the second round of seed funding for researchers across the Unversity of Delaware.

Click here to view the projects funded in the first round of seed grants.

In this round, center is seeking proposals with the aim of securing larger funding opportunities in the future. The AICoE is currently soliciting Letters of Intent (LOIs) from PIs campus-wide until October 27, 2023. In the following weeks, the LOIs will be reviewed in order to determine the projects the center can support with its current resources. The selected PIs will then be invited to submit a full proposal for consideration of funding by the AICoE.

Research Focuses

AI for Financial Equity

AI technologies aimed to reduce disparities, increase financial accessibility, and foster a more equitable financial environment.

Complementing Human Impact

Ensuring the future impact of AI for the greater good. Topics include the impact of AI on policy, social network analytics, humanities, ethics, law, and science among others

AI for Medicine, Science, and Engineering

Enabling precision medicine, drug repurposing, identify actionable information from large and complex datasets using neural networks, healthcare analytics; detecting ecological balance of nature, environmental conditions and irrigation for better plant growth, climate change; developing engineering systems

AI to Build Software Infrastructure

AI driven scientific computing tackling large computing workloads on emerging AI accelerators

Resources Available

The AICoE has various resources and support available for the awarded projects. When submitting the LOI form, you are welcome to request more than one resource for the center’s consideration. The AICoE welcomes the entire spectrum of research, whether it is a program in the beginning stage of development, or near the point of proposing to larger grantors.

Seed Funding Program – (Up to $20,000) The AICoE is looking to support demonstration of pilot projects to increase the success of proposals to external funding organizations (NSF, NIH, DoE, etc.). The aim is to provide resources that would strengthen faculty preparing applications for projects advancing science. Proposals that encourage interdisciplinary research are prioritized.

Research Software Engineer (RSE)/Postdoc Support (% of time) – The AICoE can pair a Postdoctoral Researcher with the funded project to assist in AI-related taskes. The Postdoc will work alongside the team and bring AI knowledge and expertise to the project.

Undergraduate Student Support – (Up to $4,500) The AICoE is providing funding support towards undergraduate students pursing AI-related research at any stage of their development. The center provides a match-making service in order to connect you with a dependable CIS undergraduate student to join the team.  

UDEL DARWIN Compute Resources – DARWIN is a big data and high performance computing system designed to catalyze Delaware research and education. The center serves as facilitators for those looking to utilize DARWIN resources in their work, helping them access these valuable assets for their projects. For more information on DARWIN, please visit dsi.udel.edu/core/computational-resources/darwin/.

Workshops – The AICoE will provide resources and assistant to funded PIs interested in running a workshop after funding has been awarded. 

Eligibility for Submitting Proposal

We welcome proposals that come from a UD faculty member who qualifies as a Principal Investigator (PI). Applicants may only submit one proposal as a PI or Co-PI.

PIs who were awarded in round one of seed funding may not submit a proposal in round 2 as a PI. Round 1 PIs may be a Co-PI on a proposal that is for a different project than what was awarded in round one.

Letter of Intent Submission

The Letter of Intent period is now closed. If you have submitted an LOI to the AI Center of Excellence, stay tuned for information regarding the progress of your submission. 

Feel free to email the center at ai-coe@udel.edu if you have any questions!