I am so burnt out right now trying to find funding, but these seem like things i do and a lot of you do, and if anyone makes a grant and needs to add an andy to it, go for it!
LOIs accepted on a rolling basis 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. Current areas the Foundation is exploring include:
AI in Science. The complexity and opacity of AI-driven research methods has raised new questions about the degree to which their results can or should be trusted to advance scientific research. Current areas of interest include: reproducibility and transparency of machine learning-enabled science; ways that the philosophy of science and related fields might help to inform the optimal uses of machine learning to produce new knowledge; and the relative value of foundation models vs. good old fashioned machine learning for scientific discovery.
Automation in Science. Advances in robotics can enable the automation of many aspects of scientific lab and field work, especially when coupled with AI to dramatically accelerate iterative cycles of discovery. Though not substantially funding the implementation of these systems at scale, we are currently exploring their optimal uses by researchers as well as the institutional structures to support them.
I seem to remember you using some sort of AI for Mothbox, am I remembering that correctly? Is that something you can generalize to pursue their “AI in Science” grant?
Hey, @naikymen, I expect to work more on lab automation this year. Please count on me if you need a hand to write a proposal and/or execute some tasks.
Hi happy to help with any proposal writing and research …developing and conducting workshops and interviews and writing academic papers : I am working on and using different approaches especially from futures studies and speculative design to imagine scenario’s and provoke people to think about AI, how it can be used and what impact it could have and then use these insights to for example develop recommendations for policymakers, researchers, developers and whether we need regulations, standards etc . so any legal (access to data, privacy, open source AI) or ethical and creative approaches…happy to help
Thinking about a focus…would anyone be interested to colaborate on getting funding to develop AI in OSH futures to provoke discussions about how AI can and will disrupt our communities for better and worse ? Although there is discussion I think we could benefit from more engagement and helping others share their perspectives to also counter and challenge the more dominant AI policy and AI narratives and focus on existential risks ? Maybe we can propose a series of AIFutures workshops using speculative design similar to what I have been doing the past few years already and publish a report with futures open science hardware fiction scenarios !!!
so im thinking of sending a LOI to develop a series of open science fiction workshops bringing together OSH with the AI developers community to co-design a series of futures scenarios with the aim to provoke discussions and share experiences and insights and draft recommendations. Let me know if anyone wants to Andy-up ;-0