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 fourth funding round, 2026-2027 academic year.  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.

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. Personalization
9. AI Accelerated Science and Engineering Innovation

Important Dates

●    March 24, 2026: Abstract Submission Deadline
●    April 10, 2026:  Invitations to submit full proposals
●    April 17, 2026: Center Symposium in Urbana, IL
●    April 27, 2026: Full Proposal Submission Due
●   June 30, 2026: Full Proposal Acceptance Notification