LatinX in AI (LXAI) Supercomputer Network
Call for Proposals (CFP)
Timeline
Submission Opens: September 6, 2024
Deadline: October 21, 2024
Decision letters will be sent out in Q4 2024.
We aim to strengthen the capacities of the LatinX artificial intelligence ecosystem including researchers, academics, students, nascent startups, and NGO and civil societies interested in harnessing the potential of data science and AI for social or ambiental endeavors through access to infrastructure.
Selection Criteria
Our committee will make the selection decisions based on the creativity and quality of the scientific content, and potential impact on the research community and society at large.
Table of Contents
Click Link to Jump to Section
Submission Details | Topics of Interest | Benefits | Project Axes | Eligibility Criteria | Recipient Expectations | Excluded Topics | Application Contents | Application Template | Hardware
Submission Details
We encourage submissions from LatinX identifying researchers, NGOs, and startups globally, who are teaching at universities or perform basic or applied research and meet the eligibility requirements. It is our hope that this program will help develop collaborations with new professors and encourage the formation of long-term relationships.
We welcome submissions in theoretical and methodological contributions, but also applications of artificial intelligence by nascent startups or NGOs. We encourage the PIs (for academic projects) or technical leads (for applied projects) to highlight their contribution to improving the research or social, economic, or environmental conditions in Latin America in the abstract of the proposal (although a statement of purpose is required as an appendix). There should be a clear justification for the use of GPUs in your proposal.
If you have any questions, please contact us at gpu-access@latinxinai.org
Topics of Interest
Topics of interest include all aspects of Artificial Intelligence theory and their applications including, but not limited to:
Algorithms and Theory
Augmented and Virtual Reality
Computer Vision and Machine Perception
Data Mining and Modeling
Education Innovation
Economics and Electronic Commerce
Evolutionary Computing and Optimization
Health and Bioscience
Human-computer interaction
Knowledge Representation and Learning
Machine Intelligence
Machine Translation
Natural Language and Speech Processing
Planning and Scheduling
Predictive Analytics
Robotics
Security, Privacy, and Abuse Prevention
Systems Modeling (hardware and software)
Benefits
All applicants will receive:
Feedback on their research submission by LXAI GPU Access Research Sub-Committee members
Potential for collaboration with reviewers and other applicants of the program
Selected awardees will receive:
Access to GPU computing cluster for a specified number of job hours or timeline depending on the specific project requirements
Documentation for access, training, and set-up of their projects on this system
Support from the LXAI GPU Access Technical Sub-Committee
Access to training materials from NVIDIA, Inc
Support from the LXAI GPU Access Education Sub-Committee to further outcomes of the project
Axes for the Projects
We prioritize projects related to the main areas of artificial intelligence described above to solve problems in any application area or in conducting basic research. For the guidance of suitable application areas, you can review the classification done by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) on their AI Trends Report (Figure 1.3. Ai application fields, page 27). We are accepting applications in three main axes, which are described as follows:
Eligibility Criteria
(a) Academic Primary Investigator (PI): To be a full-time professor (assistant, associate, or full) at a university or degree-granting research institution. For academic applications, post-doctoral staff and graduate students can only serve as a co-PI, not a primary PI.
(b) Startup & NGOs: NGOs and startup applications are strongly encouraged to reach out and include at least one academic institution for the application; or have a Ph.D. researcher as part of its team. This is not mandatory but highly encouraged to add to the research quality of the proposal.
(c) Representing Multiple Teams: Applicants can submit one application per year. The main author of a proposal can only serve as a PI or Co-PI per round. Applicants cannot serve on two separate proposals in the same cohort.
(d) Primarily LatinX identified: The team applying for and granted access (PI, co-PI, and/or student) must consist of at least 50% LatinX identifying members.
Expectations from Recipients
To the extent deemed reasonable, selected projects should acknowledge the support from the consortium*.
The recipients will inform us of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research. The awardees are expected to provide updates and feedback to Latinx in AI via surveys or reports on the status of their research.
Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with NVIDIA or Latinx in AI on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and the consortium.
*The consortium includes Nvidia, LatinX in AI, Tec de Monterrey AI Hub (Pilot Site).
Exclusions
Projects that we will not accept include:
Military or War-Related (exceptions for humanitarian relief)
Oil Industries
Political
Human Rights Violations (Surveillance)
Toy Projects
Application Contents
The proposal should be a maximum of 2 pages, excluding references and the appendices.
Proposal Overview
Proposal Title
Principal Investigator full name, contact information (postal address, email address, phone), affiliation (university, school, college, research center and/or department)
Co-PI information (optional)
Abstract
Keywords
For an example of what a proposal may look like (though the relative length of each section may differ by proposal), you may refer to the following links:
Proposal Sections
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For academic applications the appendix should include:
a 2-page CV of the primary Principal Investigator, which is required for all applications (a 2-page CV for co-Principal Investigator team is optional) and a statement of purpose.
We additionally request a Google Scholar and DBLP profile. Our reviewers find it helpful to easily reference a Principal Investigator's publication history to see how the current proposal relates to past work of the Investigator. The Google Scholar profile complements the Principal Investigator's 2-page CV.
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Provide a problem statement and discuss the motivation for carrying out the project.
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Describe how you plan to solve the problem, breaking the proposed solution into specific items, i.e., stages with well-defined goals, milestones, measures of success, deliverables, etc.
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Describe which impact and outcomes your project will have. For academic projects, you can discuss this in terms of human resources formation, development of any publicly available dataset, new capabilities, impact on larger projects, the advancement of state-of-the-art knowledge, etc.
Please include milestones with timeline estimates, such as for datasets, code releases, technical reports, publications, applications, presentations, etc.
Broader Impacts: The Broader Impacts criterion encompasses the potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes. Consider the following questions.
What is the potential for the proposed activity to benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes?
To what extent do the proposed activities suggest and explore creative, original or potentially transformative concepts?
Is the plan for carrying out the proposed activities well-reasoned, well-organized and based on sound rationale? Does the plan incorporate a mechanism to assess success?
How well qualified is the individual, team or institution to conduct the proposed activities
Are there adequate resources available to the principal investigator (either at the home institution or through collaborations) to carry out the proposed activities
How will the access to the computer resources provided by the consortium help you advance your research if your project is supported?
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Estimate of needed computing resources. If you have an estimate for the number of GPUs to be used and the required amount of time for running your experiments. Please, justify your choices. You can reference resources needed by relevant research articles.
Software requirements. Please give a list of software requirements for your project: packages, versions, programming languages, etc.
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Our goal is to support work where the output will be made available to the broader research community. To that end, we ask that you provide us with a few sentences sharing what you intend to do with the output of your project (e.g. open-sourcing code, making data sets public, who will maintain the public datasets, and for how long after the project is completed, etc.). Please note that there are no legal requirements once a project is selected This is simply a statement of your current intentions.
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An unrestricted number of pages.
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Suggested reviewers are not included in the proposal PDF format. There will be an open_review field to add them. Please include their names, title, affiliation, and emails. Make sure they do not have any relationship to you, nor a prior joint collaboration. These reviewers must have no conflicting interests in reviewing your proposal. Ideal reviewers can be people who are other leading experts in your field who are most likely to be impartial in the review process.
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Should include the following:
2 Page CV of the Principal Investigator
2 Page CV of the remaining team (i.e. co-PIs) (if applies)
You can follow the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) guidelines for preparing your 2 page CV.
a) Your professional preparation: undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral. Include the institution, major, degree and year.
b) Appointments:
List in reverse chronological order of your more recent academic and professional appointments. Include your current appointment
c) Publications: List up to five publications, patents, copyrights, or software systems relevant to the current proposal.
d) Synergistic Activities:
List up to five examples of your professional and scholarly work that demonstrate your participation in and commitment to the broader impact goals of the call. It can be event and challenges organization, part of conferences, technical program committee or editorial boards, and any other pro bono activities, etc.
e) Current supervised students or description of the team lead by the PI for startups/NGOs
f) Collaborators and other affiliations; Conflicts of Interest (COI):
This section has three parts:
1) collaborators and co-editors;
2) your graduate and post-graduate advisors and
3) the current and former students who you advised as graduate or postgraduate students.
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A completed and signed copy of the Authenticity and Permissions form: Authenticity Form
In this form, you represent and warrant that your proposal
(a) is either your original work or an update to the original work;
(b) does not, to your knowledge, infringe any third party patent rights; and
(c) does not infringe, misappropriate, or otherwise violate any other third party intellectual property rights (i.e. other than patent rights), including any copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, contract or licensing rights, rights of publicity or privacy, or moral rights.
(d) Include a self-declaration about permissions when dealing with certain datasets?
"Writing GPU Supercomputing Grant Applications"
Watch this tutorial held on the 24th of August, 2022 led by Dr. Matias Valdenegro-Toro, Assistant Professor at the University of Groningen on "Writing GPU Supercomputing Grant Applications". Overview to prepare for submission of the LXAI Supercomputer Research Grant proposal.
Supercomputer Hardware
We are very grateful to NVIDIA, Inc for donating a DGX A100 Supercomputer system to help LatinX in AI (LXAI) launch this program starting with our pilot site at Tec de Monterrey in Mexico! Learn about the hardware they’ve offered in this introductory video.