Call for Fellowships

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 2025 PhD Fellowship Nominations to recognize outstanding PhD students doing exceptional work in Machine Learning Systems at Illinois. 

Research topic areas

• Large-scale training of multimodal foundational models, including scaling, efficiency, and goodput improvements, fault tolerance and resilience, elastic training, and restart-less recovery.
• Inference of multimodal foundational models, including latency and throughput optimizations of transformer and emerging architectures, distributed and multi-node inference, resource efficient scaling to extremely long contexts, model compression and punning, optimizing end-to-end latency of agentic workflows.

Award Amount

The fellowship offers 9 months support (Spring 2025 – Fall 2025).  The fellowship value is approximately $70k and the funds will be paid to the awardee’s 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 December 17, 2024
• Acceptance Notification: December 20, 2024

• No Longer Accepting Applications