Call for Fellowships

Introduction:

The Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE) is a collaboration between Amazon and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, to revolutionize the paradigm and develop intelligent conversational systems that can automatically acquire, create, validate, reason, and update their knowledge through multimodal interactions with data and human users. The AICE Center is calling for the 2026-2027 PhD Fellowship Nominations  to recognize outstanding PhD students doing exceptional work at Illinois. In this second phase, the center will support approximately two PhD fellows among a wide range of cutting-edge research areas, including but not limited to

Topics:
 

1. Foundation Model Improvements
2. Foundation Model/Agentic Evaluation

3. Efficient Generative AI & Efficient Inference

4. Reasoning

5. Knowledge Grounding 

6. Agentic AI

7. Personalization

8. Responsible Generative AI 

9. AI Accelerated Science and Engineering Innovation 
   

Award Amount

The fellowship offers 9 months support (2026 – 2027).  The fellowship value is approximately $70k and the funds will be paid to the awardees home department to cover the costs of:

• 9-month 50% GRA stipend at the departmental prevailing rate
• Tuition waiver in the form of tuition remission paid to the university
• Up to $5K in travel support funds

Through the PhD fellowships, AICE will also provide awardees opportunities to collaborate with Amazon scientists and a pathway to apply for summer internships at Amazon.

Eligibility

• Full-time doctoral student in the 3^rd year or higher of a PhD program at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, pursuing research in one of the topical areas listed above or related areas.
• Have passed their home department’s required PhD qualifying exams.
• Have a faculty member serving as PhD thesis advisor.
• Remain an active, full-time student in a PhD program during the fellowship period.
• Students that are already supported by another industry-sponsored fellowship are not eligible.
• Students of any citizenship/nationality are eligible.

Important Dates

• Proposal Submission Deadline: 11:59pm CT April 27, 2026