National Geographic Grant of up to $ 100,000 for AI Projects 2020

The National Geographic Society and Microsoft’s AI for Earth program are partnering to support the exploration of how AI can help people discover, identify, and classify new species. The Artificial Intelligence for Species Discovery RFP will provide support to projects that accelerate discovery, monitoring, and modeling, and ultimately improve the management of Earth’s biodiversity for a more sustainable future.

Grant Details:

The grants will support the creation and deployment of open source trained models, algorithms, and datasets to support species discovery. To strengthen his application, the applicant must consider aligning with a research group to address a biodiversity question. For example, pair an expert capable of creating and deploying an open-source trained model or algorithm with a research specialist using this model or algorithm to address a pressing biodiversity question. National Geographic Society encourages proposals for work in any biome.

Proposed work should create generalizable, scalable tools that use AI to support species discovery. Priority will be given to projects that do one or more of the following:

• Use AI to address challenges in filling biodiversity data gaps.
• Generate data and develop open-source technologies that contribute to scientific inquiry and advance people's knowledge of the planet’s biodiversity.
• Use AI and machine learning to capitalize on the information potential of massive and complex datasets.

Grant Amount: 

Proposals may request $5,000 to $100,000. The budgets of successful proposals will include reasonable, well-justified costs directly required to complete the project. Applicant should refer to the Preparing Your Proposal page regarding budget guidance, including stipend eligibility, and justify all budget requests in detail. Successful applicants may use awarded funds over one year.

In addition to financial support, successful proposals will receive free access to Microsoft’s AI for Earth API’s, applications, tools, and tutorials, and support for their computational work on Microsoft Azure.

Project Requirements:

All models supported through this grant must be open source, and grant recipients must be willing to (1) publicly share their models for use by other environmental researchers, and (2) share the underlying data with the National Geographic Society. More specifically, grant recipients must:

• Make their solutions available for publication on the AI for Earth website through a designated open source license.
• Make their training data on which their solutions are developed publicly available in a standard digital format.
• Implement their solutions on Microsoft Azure.

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