Organization: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Technology Program

Award amount: Undisclosed; Most projects funded between 50K to 600K

Sponsor deadline: Rolling deadline.

Description: The Foundation’s Technology grantmaking aims to leverage advances in technology to benefit the research community. This includes three sub programs: (1) Exploratory Grantmaking in Technology; (2) Open Source in Science; and (3) Scientific Collaboration.  The RFP can be found here. Interested grantseekers should email a letter of inquiry of no more than two pages to technology@sloan.org. Contact UW College of Arts & Sciences Corporate & Foundations Relations if you are interested in applying or have questions.

The fast pace of technological change and broader investment of resources by industry drive the architecture of the Foundation’s Technology grantmaking, which aims to leverage advances in technology to benefit the research community. The program includes exploratory grantmaking designed to quickly surface, develop, and evaluate emerging technologies, as well as subprograms that are structured to develop specific opportunities through sustained grantmaking that engages technical, community, and institutional practices. A new focus area is AI as a tool or collaborator. The foundation is interested in ideas to help clarify where AI-as-tool ends, where AI-as-collaborator might responsibly begin, and what technical, institutional, or design work is needed to bridge that gap for the scientific enterprise.

Exploratory grantmaking is intended to bring community needs and priorities into sharper focus and allow the Foundation to determine whether there is a clear strategy and potential impact in a specific area. Supported activities may include workshops and other expert convenings, early technology development and prototyping, landscape analyses, development of protocols and standards, initial research on and engagement with potential user communities, and demonstration or other proof-of-concept projects. Ideal focus areas lie at the intersection of research and technology, are sufficiently limited that the Foundation could make an impact with its available resources, and involve issues for which public or private funding is scarce or unavailable.  Focus areas: AI in Science & Automation in Science.

Once viewed as primarily a licensing strategy, open source has become increasingly established as a set of practices that facilitate distributed collaboration. To fully realize the potential of innovations like data science, computational modeling, novel instrumentation, and machine learning, this program aims to adapt and extend best practices in open source into academic technology development while recognizing the unique workflows and incentives of scientific research. Rather than funding individual open source development projects, grants in this area focus mainly on tooling, institutions, economic models, and incentives around the production, maintenance, and adoption of research software, hardware, models, and other related research outputs. Focus areas: Institutional Support for Open Source, Publication & Archiving, and Roles & Career Paths.

Technology platforms can enable geographically dispersed collaboration in configurations that mix remote and in-person, live and asynchronous, immersive, and even human and nonhuman interaction. Given the climate, public health, and equity issues raised by needing to meet in-person, this program explores the ways that technology can enable or inhibit rich interactions at different scales across distance, time zones, and languages. Focus areas: The Future of Conferences & Workshops, Group Dynamics in Science, & Human-AI Collaboration.

Faculty & PIs