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AWS AI: Agentic AI call for proposals — Spring 2025

Advancing the frontiers of AI.

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About this CFP

AWS offers a broad and deep set of tools for businesses to create impactful AI solutions faster. Our mission is to share our learnings and AI capabilities as fully managed services, and put them into the hands of every scientist and developer.

AWS AI aims to advance agentic AI research by funding development of open-source tools and research that benefit the AI community at large, or impactful research related to agents.

We welcome proposals related to agentic AI in the areas below:

  1. Retrieval across structured and unstructured data
  2. Tool/API calling over long horizons
  3. Human interfaces, such as computer use, when programmatic APIs don’t exist
  4. Self analyzing/reflecting, catching mistakes, backtracking, new path finding capabilities
  5. Reward models, programmatic and learned verifiers
  6. Automated reasoning and neuro-symbolic techniques for output synthesis and verification
  7. Safety and responsible AI for agentic behavior
  8. Automated feedback loops for agents to improve
  9. Multi-agent collaborations
  10. Protocols for interfacing with data sources, tools/APIs, and other agents
  11. Application domains, including but not limited to, software engineering, enterprise, healthcare & life sciences, finance, media & entertainment, consumer agentic assistants

Other topics related to the agentic AI development and applications are also welcome.

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:

  1. Unrestricted funds, no more than $70,000 USD on average
  2. AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $50,000 USD on average
  3. 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 for this CFP should be prepared according to the proposal template and are encouraged to be a maximum of 3 pages, not including Appendices. In addition, to submit a proposal for this CFP, please also include the following information:

  1. Please list the open-source tools you plan to contribute to.
  2. Please list the AWS ML tools you will use.

Selection criteria

ARA will make the funding decisions based on the potential impact to the research community and the quality of the scientific content. We encourage research that uses machine learning tools, for example AWS AI/ML services (Amazon SageMaker, Amazon AI services, Amazon Bedrock).

Expectations from recipients

To the extent deemed reasonable, award recipients may acknowledge support from ARA (e.g., (“Research reported in this [publication/press release] was supported by an Amazon Research Award, [Cycle /Year].“). 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.

Additional Information

Previously, this CFP was issued through the AWS Machine Learning Research Awards (MLRA) program. MLRA now funds awards through ARA.

How to apply
When you're ready to submit your proposal, use the button below and follow the instructions on the site.
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