About this CFP
Amazon Ads is committed to protect customers from fraud, abuse, illegal and harmful content. We prioritize customer protection through a comprehensive approach of strict policies, thorough review processes, and safety measures to ensure digital advertising content meet high standards. We maintain robust reporting systems, allowing for swift action against policy violations. These multilayered safeguards work in tandem to shield customers from exposure to abusive and harmful content, fostering a secure advertising environment for both consumers and advertisers.
We welcome proposals in the context of digital advertising in the following research tracks:
- Fraud, Abuse, and financial scams
- Behavioral foundational models to distinguish hum and bot behavior
- Multi-modal classification of online content and websites
- Device and website identification
- Detection of plagiarized content
- Cyber threat activity, malicious and adversarial misuse of AI and LLMs
- Decentralized identifiers, verifiable credentials, data lineage and transparency
- Large language models for labeling, annotation and auditing of model performance
- Detection and mitigation of hallucination in LLMs for content analysis
- Protection of vulnerable individuals, specially child and teen safety
Timeline
Submission period: March 19 to April 30, 2025 (11:59PM Pacific Time).
Decision letters will be sent out in August 2025.
Award details
Selected Principal Investigators (PIs) may receive the following:
- Unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD on average
- AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average
- Training resources, including AWS tutorials and hands-on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers
Awards are structured as one-time unrestricted gifts. 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.
Eligibility requirements
Please refer to the ARA Program rules on the Rules and Eligibility page.
Proposal requirements
Proposals should be prepared according to the proposal template. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:
- Description of the proposed solution and its innovative aspects
- Explanation of how the project addresses the specified challenges
- Plan for the development and implementation of the methodology or dataset
- Potential impact on customer protections
- List of open-source tools, datasets or methodologies you plan to contribute to
- List of AWS tools you will use
Selection criteria
Proposals will be reviewed by a panel of experts. Proposals will be evaluated on the following:
- Immediate and sizeable impact on customer protections
- Practicality and scalability of the solutions
- Feasibility and clarity of the proposed approach
- Potential for widespread adoption and implementation
- Feasibility to open source
- Generation of publicly available benchmarks (metrics and data sets)
Expectations from recipients
To the extent deemed reasonable, Award recipients should acknowledge the support from ARA. Award recipients will inform ARA of publications, presentations, code and data releases, blogs/social media posts, and other speaking engagements referencing the results of the supported research or the Award. Award recipients are expected to provide updates and feedback to ARA via surveys or reports on the status of their research. Award recipients will have an opportunity to work with ARA on an informational statement about the awarded project that may be used to generate visibility for their institutions and ARA.