Microsoft Cloud AI Research Challenge

Teams can be a mix of individuals from academic and private/public organizations.

Yes. Teams can be comprised of individuals that are all academics, all private/public organizations, or a mix of both.

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Faculty, research staff members, graduate students, and postdocs are qualified to apply for Azure resources. Undergraduate and Masters students require a faculty supervisor to submit a proposal if it is part of an ongoing research program. Deadline to apply for resources is February 15, 2018. This deadline has passed.

Include information for all team members. The biography of the team lead is sufficient unless there are other researchers making significant contributions who you would like to highlight in the proposal.

We are looking for projects that will advance the state of research by using Microsoft Cloud AI products. These projects may be individual scientific investigations or activities that support a research discipline. We are excited by original ideas. We are thrilled by projects that make cloud-based open source tools available to the community.

We plan to complete the review process and notify winners within sixty (60) days of April 15, 2018. However, that date may change depending on the number of proposals we receive.

Microsoft Cloud AI is a set of AI tools and services that help developers and researchers create applications that assist humanity and augment our capabilities. With the Azure platform and productivity services, you can create the next generation of applications that span an intelligent cloud as well as an intelligent edge powered by AI. AI Services is a collection of powerful APIs enables your apps to intelligently interpret the world and to naturally engage your users through vision, speech, language, and knowledge. Our free, easy-to-use, open-source, commercial-grade tools train deep-learning algorithms to learn like the human brain by helping you adopt programming languages and algorithms you already use to AI applications.

Email cairmsr@microsoft.com with questions about the Cloud AI Research Challenge.

You can engage with the community on the Cloud AI Gitter chat or the MSDN Machine Learning Forum.

Yes, as long as one team member is an academic, that academic can apply for the Azure resources.

The resources are available in all countries in which Azure is available. This list is continually growing. View a comprehensive country list and the full terms and conditions here.

A simple acknowledgment is always appreciated. You can use the following: “Cloud computing resources were provided by Microsoft Azure for Research.

Your Microsoft account (previously called Windows Live ID) is the combination of an email address and a password that you use to sign in to services like Outlook.com, Skype, OneDrive, or Xbox LIVE. If you don’t have a Microsoft account, it is easy to create one—and it’s free. You can even create a Microsoft account that can be used by your entire research team to access your Azure resources.

Yes. By submitting an app to the challenge, you retain any intellectual property rights. However, Microsoft will have the right to feature all apps entered in the competition for promotional purposes. Please note that in order to be eligible for detailed evaluation, it is advantageous if your application code is made available via one of the approved open source licenses listed at http://opensource.org/licenses.

Microsoft will have the right to publicly display your submission on the challenge website. They will also be allowed to publicize your name on the challenge website in connection with the submission and the challenge during the competition and for 36 months after its conclusion. For more information on publicity rights, please see the complete set of rules.