Amazon Research Awards

• The Amazon Research Awards (ARA) program funds academic research and related contributions to open-source projects by top academic researchers around the world.
• ARA aims to fund projects leading toward a PhD degree or conducted as a part of post-doctoral work.
• Awards are structured as one-year unrestricted gifts to the Principal Investigator's academic institution or organization.

• Awards are structured as unrestricted gifts to the principal investigator's academic institution or organization.
• Amazon retains no intellectual property rights to the resulting work. Recipients are encouraged to publish outcomes and commit related code to open-source repositories.
• Recipients are assigned an Amazon research contact who offers consultation and advice along with opportunities to participate in Amazon events and training sessions.
• A proposed cash budget is generally expected to support one or two PhD students (or a post-doctoral researcher) for one year, plus some conference travel and equipment. The budget should include a list of expected costs specified in USD, and should not include administrative overhead costs. The final award amount will be determined by the awards panel.
• Unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD on average for both topics proposals.
• Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following also training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers.

• Each Principal Investigator is permitted to submit only one proposal to the ARA Program per call for proposal period.
• Each proposal should be submitted by a single faculty member, who will also supervise the student or post-doc who is to be funded by the award. Other members of the research team can and should be mentioned in the proposal.

Alexa Fariness in Al: Alexa AI-Natural Understanding’s (NU) mission is to build and enable engaging, world-class conversational AI capabilities that are broadly accessible. Under this call for proposals, we are seeking to fund research projects on the following topics:

• Transparency, explainability, and accountability in AI systems
• Theories of computational/algorithm fairness and factors that affect algorithmic trustworthiness
• Detecting and ameliorating adverse biases in data and algorithms, and fairness-aware design of algorithms
• Metrics and methods for designing, piloting, and evaluating systems that mitigate against adverse biases and ensure fairness, including the use of human-machine collaboration and decision support

AWS Automated Reasoning: AWS is committed to helping you achieve the highest levels of security in the cloud. Using automated reasoning technology, the application of mathematical logic to help answer critical questions about your infrastructure, AWS is able to detect previously missed misconfigurations, or show their absence. We call this provable security that provides higher assurance in security—both of the cloud and in the cloud. We are looking to fund research in these subcategories:

• Automated reasoning, including model checking
• Theorem proving
• Invariant discovery
• Improvements to SAT/SMT solvers
• Correct-by-construction software
• Abstract interpretation
• Static analysis