Accelerate Foundation Models Research
Region: Global
Call for proposals: Fall 2023
About the program
Foundation models are fueling a fundamental shift in computing research and across the sciences. Even as industry-led advances in AI continue to reach new heights, we believe that a vibrant and diverse research ecosystem remains essential to realizing the promise of AI to benefit people and society while mitigating risks. Accelerate Foundation Models Research (AFMR) is a research grant program through which we will make leading foundation models hosted by Microsoft Azure more accessible to the academic research community via Microsoft Azure AI services.
By driving deeper collaboration across disciplines, institutions, and sectors, we aim to unlock the full potential of AI across greater breadth of research pursuits, application domains, and societal contexts.
Key dates:
- August 24, 2023 | Call for proposals opens globally
- September 12, 2023 | Proposal deadline
- September 22, 2023 | Notifications; onboarding process begins
- September 2023 – January 2024 | Research collaboration period
Potential research topics
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(e.g., enable robustness, sustainability, transparency, trustfulness, develop evaluation approaches)
- How should we evaluate foundation models?
- How might we mitigate the risks and potential harms of foundation models such as bias, unfairness, manipulation, and misinformation?
- How might we enable continual learning and adaptation, informed by human feedback?
- How might we ensure that the outputs of foundation models are faithful to real-world evidence, experimental findings, and other explicit knowledge?
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(e.g., increase human ingenuity, creativity and productivity, decrease AI digital divide)
- How might we advance the study of the social and environmental impacts of foundation models?
- How might we foster ethical, responsible, and transparent use of foundation models across domains and applications?
- How might we study and address the social and psychological effects of large language models on human behavior, cognition, and emotion?
- How can we develop AI technologies that are inclusive of everyone on the planet?
- How might foundation models be used to enhance the creative process?
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(e.g., advanced knowledge discovery, causal understanding, generation of multi-scale multi-modal scientific data)
- How might foundation models accelerate knowledge discovery, hypothesis generation and analysis workflows in natural and life sciences?
- How might foundation models be used to transform scientific data interpretation and experimental data synthesis?
- Which new scientific datasets are needed to train, fine-tune, and evaluate foundation models in natural and life sciences?
- How might foundation models be used to make scientific data more discoverable, interoperable, and reusable?
Provisions of the award
The following resources may be made available to researchers (principal investigators) whose proposals are selected:
- Azure credits for project usage up to USD 20,000 until Jan 31, 2024
- Azure Open AI: API access to Azure OpenAI Service models to promote responsible AI research which may include:
- GPT-3 series (prompting and fine-tuning), GPT-4 (prompting)
- Codex (based GPT-3 models that can understand and generate code)
- Embeddings model series (for semantic mapping and semantic search use cases)
- DALL-E 2 (create original, realistic images and art from a text description)
- Open-source models including Llama-2 model family
- Azure API services (Speech, vision, decision, translation)
- Microsoft Open-sourced libraries and tools for foundation models (e.g., Semantic Kernel)