UW+Amazon Science Hub

Gift-funded Research Projects

The Science Hub welcomes proposals from UW faculty and research scientists with principal investigator status. Under this funding mechanism, the Science Hub is looking for cutting-edge and exploratory projects for a period of one year. Researchers with approved proposals will receive seed funding up to $100k. Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts to the principal investigator. Each gift funded proposal will be subject to 5% assessment per UW Administrative Policy (APS) 36.2. Seed funding is meant to develop innovative basic or use-inspired research direction in one or more fields related to Robotics and Artificial Intelligence, including their societal impacts. Seed projects may have the potential for renewal for additional funding, or may lead to sponsored research funding with one or more Amazon units.

We welcome applications from diverse candidates, including those from historically underrepresented communities in the sciences, engineering, and mathematics fields.

Open Calls for Proposals

2024 Robotics

The Science Hub seeks proposals to advance the state of the art and enable new robotics and AI solutions, in the following topic areas:

  • Robotics Foundation Models — Architectures and training methods to create machine learning models that understand the physics of objects in contact, based on many examples of observing robot actions.
  • Fine, Compliant Manipulation — Handling of items in dense clutter, including a wide mixture of object types and the need for multi-touch interactions to retrieve or store objects.
  • Simulation — Techniques for high-fidelity simulation of deformable and articulated objects (e.g., books, bagged clothing, etc.), including those that learn from real-world interactions.
  • Video AI for Robotics — Machine learning for understanding a robotic action’s outcome/effects or for monitoring the likely success of a robotic behavior, based on video.
  • Mobile Manipulation — Methods for planning and control of mobile manipulators, such as required for quickly transferring objects across a room or loading/unloading densely packed boxes

Proposals must be submitted here: https://forms.gle/TpRX51o2MABgUukD8

Applications will close on Monday, May 20, 2024.

Questions regarding the call for proposals should be directed to amazonscience@uw.edu.

All UW researchers are welcome to apply. The application includes basic demographic questions, and requests an uploaded copy of your CV and a 2 to 4-page research proposal. The proposal should include a short description of the budget request of up to $100k for one-year. Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts to the principal investigator. Each gift funded proposal will be subject to a 5% assessment per UW Administrative Policy (APS) 36.2. No third parties should be involved in the projects. Per default, project results will be made available to the general public through publication and open source.

2024 Healthcare

The Science Hub seeks proposals to advance the state of the art in healthcare and associated AI in the following topic areas:

  • AI in Clinical and Primary Care Settings
  • Trustworthy and Responsible AI for Healthcare
  • AI for Autonomous Research in Health (knowledge development for prevention, diagnosis, and treatment)
  • Automation and Optimization of Prescription Transfers (across pharmacies) (ML/Reinforcement Learning/Gen-AI for message generation)
  • Prescription Recommendation and Next-Period Prediction Based on Multimodal Personalized Medical Data and Static Information (e.g., demographics)
  • Prescription Fraud (and anomaly detection) Based on Multimodal Personalized Medical Data and Static Information (e.g., demographics)

Proposals must be submitted here: https://forms.gle/eSi8Dukyii5QtBCd9

Applications will close on Monday, May 20, 2024.

All UW researchers are welcome to apply. The application includes basic demographic questions, and requests an uploaded copy of your CV and a 2 to 4-page research proposal. The proposal should include a short description of the budget request of up to $100k for one-year. Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts to the principal investigator. Each gift funded proposal will be subject to a 5% assessment per UW Administrative Policy (APS) 36.2. No third parties should be involved in the projects. Per default, project results will be made available to the general public through publication and open source.

Previous Calls for Proposals