Call for Proposals - Full Proposal

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 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.

Context

Amazon is improving customers’ lives with practical, useful generative AI innovations. We do this by building and deploying AI across three technology layers: at the bottom layer we offer our own high performance and cost-effective custom chips, as well as a variety of other computing options including from third parties. At the middle layer, we offer customers choice by providing the broadest selection of Foundation Models—both Amazon-built as well as those from other leading providers. At the top layer we offer generative AI applications and services to improve every customer experience.

There are three things that distinguish Amazon’s approach to the development and deployment of AI:

1. Maintaining a strategic focus on improving the customer and employee experience through practical, real-world applications of AI.
2. marshaling our world-class data, compute, and talent resources to drive AI innovation; and
3. committing to the development of responsible, reliable, and trustworthy AI.

Topics of interest would include, but are not limited to, those below.

1. Foundation Model Improvements
2. Foundation Model Evaluation
3. Efficient Generative AI
4. Reasoning
5. Knowledge Grounding
6. Agentic AI
7. Responsible Generative AI
8. Applications of Generative AI

Important Dates

●    March 20, 2025: Abstract Submission Deadline
●    March 21 - May 6, 2025: Abstract feedback sessions with Amazon scientists and UIUC Faculty
●    April 13 & April 14, 2025: Center Symposium in Urbana
●    June 15, 2025: Full Proposal Submission Due
●    July 2025: Full Proposal Acceptance Notification
●    TBD September 2025 (On Campus AICE Center Event)