APPLY NOW!!! MOZILLA TECHNOLOGY FUND AND TRANSPARENCY IN AI AWARDS 2021 ($50,000 AWARD)
OVERVIEW
The Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) supports open source technologists whose work furthers promising approaches to solving pressing internet health issues.
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The Mozilla Technology Fund (MTF) may be a grantmaking program which funds technical projects in specific areas that relate to internet health. The Mozilla Technology Fund’s first involve proposals is for projects which may expose elements of how AI (AI) systems work, so as to scale back bias in and increase the transparency of AI systems. We hope to fund projects which may empower watchdogs (including technologists and journalists) to carry the designers of AI systems accountable and to offer them tools to scale back bias and increase transparency.
For years, bias has been shown to be one among the main risks of operating AI systems at scale. Systemic bias and bias which exists in training data leads to real-world harms for people whose access to economic opportunity, social interaction, education and banking is increasingly mediated by these systems. to make more transparent AI systems, AI transparency and documentation best practices got to be developed as a way to assist unlock accountability, agency, and fairness.
Through the MTF: Bias and Transparency in AI Awards, we’ll provide awards of up to $50,000 USD each to open source technology projects which may make AI systems more trustworthy, by addressing bias and/or increasing transparency and accountability. We imagine these projects might demystify the inner workings of existing AI systems and make the planning of their algorithms transparent, by improving the explainability, interpretability and predictability of their outputs. The projects we aim to fund will provide the tools for current AI systems to raised serve the interests of individuals , and/or imagine new ways of building and training AI systems within the future. Click here to find out more about what we mean by “Trustworthy AI”. Our goal is to supply projects within the MTF: Bias and Transparency cohort with the resources needed to unlock their full potential and to form them more sustainable within the future .
Awardees are going to be expected to hitch monthly cohort involves the duration of their project (12 months, beginning in January 2022) so as to share their progress, ask questions and offer support to other project teams. Awardees also will have access to a senior Mozilla fellow that specialize in openness (who are going to be an expert in building and maintaining open source technologies and communities), who will function mentor to members of the MTF cohort, also as other Mozilla fellows expertly in AI, transparency and bias. All MTF awardees past and present will have access to the MTF Slack Community for asynchronous discussion and updates.
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What We’re trying to find
We imagine that the Bias and Transparency in AI Awards will support a spread of software projects (including utilities and frameworks), data sets, tools and style concepts. we’ll not consider applications for policy or research projects (though software projects which leverage, support or amplify policy and research initiatives are going to be considered—for example, bias metrics and statistical analyses being became easy to use and interpret software implementations). Some example projects we will imagine:
Projects that help expose elements of how AI systems in consumer technology products work, the bias which will be inherent in them and/or the way to mitigate the bias in these systems
Utilities that help developers understand and identify bias when building datasets and AI systems
Components that allow developers to supply more transparency to users on the inner workings of AI systems
Tools to assist identify, understand and mitigate the bias inherent in publicly-available datasets
Applicants should:
Have a product or working prototype in hand—projects which haven’t moved beyond the thought stage won’t be considered
Already have a core team in situ to support the event of the project (this team might include software developers working in close collaboration with AI researchers, designers, product/project managers and material experts)
Embrace openness, transparency, and community stewardship as methodology
Make their work available under an open-source license
ELIGIBILITY AND DEADLINES
These awards are hospitable all applicants no matter geographic location or institutional affiliation, except where legally prohibited. However, Mozilla is particularly curious about receiving applications from members of the worldwide Majority or Global South; Black, Indigenous, and people of Color; women, transgender, non-binary and/or gender-diverse applicants; migrant and diasporic communities; and/or persons coming from climate displaced/impacted communities, etc. We strongly encourage all such applicants to use .
Applications are going to be accepted for a period of 4 weeks and can then be reviewed by a committee of experts, which can make final funding decisions and allocate awards of up to $50,000 USD each out of a complete pool of $300,000 USD. Applicants can expect to listen to back within eight weeks of submitting an application; please email MTF@mozillafoundation.org with any questions. Applications will close on November 4th, 2021 at 12pm Eastern Time (UTC-4).