Call for Proposal Abstract
Call for Proposal - Abstract 2025 - 2026
Abstract Submission Due: March 20, 2025
Launched in 2023, the Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE) is a collaboration between Amazon and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The AICE Center is calling for proposals for the third funding round, 2025-2026 academic year. In this phase, the center will support 3+ research projects. Each funded project will support a PhD research assistant and 2-4 weeks of summer salary for principal investigators (PIs). Each selected project will then engage with research scientists from Amazon to collaborate and jointly advise PhD students. 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. In addition, we will support 1–2 larger-scale, high-risk, high-reward seed projects focused on ambitious initiatives in topic areas #1, #4, #6, and #8, with a strong emphasis on multi-PI collaboration.
Research topic areas
- Foundation Model Improvements
- Foundation Model Evaluation
- Efficient Generative AI
- Reasoning
- Knowledge Grounding
- Agentic AI
- Responsible Generative AI
- Applications of Generative AI
Call for Proposal Process
- March 20, 2025: Abstract Submission Deadline
- March 21 - April 12, 2025: Abstract feedback sessions with Amazon scientists and UIUC Faculty
- April 13 & April 18, 2025: Center Symposium in Urbana
- April 30, 2025: Full Proposal Submission Due
- Early July 2025: Full Proposal Acceptance Notification
- TBD September 2025 (On Campus AICE Center Event)
Eligibility
- Eligibility: Full-time tenure-track, research-track and teaching faculty members at Illinois are eligible to submit proposals as PIs.
Note: Faculty members that are Amazon Scholars are eligible to submit proposals but must adhere to university conflict of interest policies and procedures. These individuals are encouraged to consult the legal teams at their home departments well in advance of proposal submission. - Submissions should not reference either Amazon or Alexa, nor speculate about how the research might be applied to current or future Amazon products, services, business models or needs. Proposals should focus on the science.