Google believes that AI can provide new ways of approaching problems and meaningfully improving people’s lives: it gives us another tool to explore and address hard, unanswered questions. And while AI can help, it’s not a silver bullet: progress requires collaboration across all sectors of society. It's for this reason that Google has been investing in AI for social good, including collaborative work in flood forecasting, helping people with atypical speech, and diabetic eye disease, and in funding external organizations through grants like the Google AI Impact Challenge.
It’s for this reason that last year Google Research India announced support for six AI for Social Good projects in collaboration with academic and NGO partners. Proposals were selected from jointly-developed projects submitted by NGOs and Academics at the research workshop hosted by Google Research India. We’ve since supported each project with funding, researcher involvement to help bring projects to real impact in the field. This builds on Google’s previous AI for Social Good work.
We are focused on supporting scientific advances that positively impact the lives of communities that have not traditionally benefited from the progress in AI. We also strongly encourage open-source code from these projects to enable the research community to sustainably build upon this work. The initial projects have made significant strides, and we are confident that advancing a collaborative model is important to achieve on-the-ground and scientific impact in the field of AI for Social Good.
We are excited to announce the launch of our second call for applications for a collaborative workshop. Our goal is to bring together NGOs working on tough problems in their communities with academic experts and Google researchers in order to encourage new collaborative solutions.
NGOs: We are requesting NGO applications that highlight the problems you are facing and if AI might help further a solution to scale your impact.
We invite applications from NGOs working in India and countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia-Pacific.
Academics: We are requesting applications from Academics that highlight their interests and experiences in deploying novel AI technologies for social good.
We will prioritize academics with AI expertise in areas relevant to the NGOs’ application areas and/or experience in projects in "AI for Social Good" in the application areas of public health, conservation and agriculture.
Interested academic partners may indicate in their application how their expertise in areas such as multiagent systems, reasoning under uncertainty, reinforcement learning, computer vision may apply to the proposed application areas.
We invite applications from Academics working in AI and related fields from universities around the world
Google will help match relevant problems from NGOs with Academics. However, if you already have an ongoing collaboration (NGO + Academic), you can submit a proposal on behalf of the collaboration as well. At this stage, we do not expect to receive jointly developed NGO + Academic proposals.
Each proposal will be reviewed carefully by a team of experts at Google. Selected organisations and academic partners will be invited to a virtual workshop to jointly explore the development of AI for Social Good proposals.
Following the workshop, there may be an additional opportunity to submit joint academic-NGO proposals. Selected collaborations may be eligible for additional support from Google to help bring their ideas to life, which may include:
the opportunity to consult and collaborate with Google researchers, engineers, program and product managers, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) researchers, and more
Access to Google Cloud credits to support computing needs
NGOs: some NGOs may be considered to receive up to USD $20,000 in grant funding from Google.org to advance deployment and evaluation of AI technologies
Academics: some academics may be honoured with an award as “Impact Scholars”, recognized for their efforts in leading AI projects that have real-world impact. Impact Scholars will receive an unrestricted award of USD $10,000
Collaborative projects that move from successful pilot projects to broader implementation may be considered for additional support
NGOs: Please submit your applications on this page
Academics: Please submit your applications on this page
Deadline for application is November 23, 2020.
Workshop will be conducted virtually in February 2021. Exact dates will be confirmed soon.
Agriculture
Conservation
Public Health
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