The Institute for AI (IAI) is pleased to launch its second interdisciplinary seed grant program for this fiscal year. Our aim is to seed multi-disciplinary teams of IAI faculty with resources so that they can execute inter-disciplinary research projects that can lead to large extramural research grants. To optimize the use of limited resources, please note the following: Your proposed project should align with one or more of these five convergence themes Awarded funds must be spent during FY26 (expenditures should be made by June 30, 2026) All compensated investigators on a team must be IAI faculty fellows and teams should span two or more different home units. Collaborators who are not IAI fellows are allowed but must not receive compensation through this grant. IAI will allocate up to $30,000 for each project, and additionally Cost share commitments from your home units are required. Each IAI faculty investigator on a proposal must be supported by a documented commitment of $2,000 from their unit. The Institute for AI is making two new resources available this year to facilitate project execution. OpenAI ChatGPT API: In addition to the above amount, a project can optionally request up to $1,000 in ChatGPT API usage credits. Please consult this guidance on ChatGPT’s API pricing and justify the requested amount. AI Compute Resources: Additionally, investigators on all awarded projects will be given priority access to a new state-of-the-art high-performance AI compute cluster in GACRC for their batch compute needs. The priority access will last for the duration of the project. The funds will be transferred to the home unit of the principal investigator on each successful team, and will be further administered by this unit. IAI is unable to administer the awarded grants. IAI will conduct the competition to award the seed grants in two rounds: Round 1: Submit a letter of intent (LoI) We request a 1-page letter of intent using a template for each project. Our aim is to get an initial sense of how many applications to expect. The LoI must certify that all paid faculty on the team are with IAI, heads of all units involved in the project are aware of the cost share, and the proposed project is not currently under review or funded via internal or external grants. We will contact the PI of each team submitting a LoI with a go/no-go recommendation and discuss any perceived deficiencies. Please submit your LoIs via UGA’s InfoReady system by October 17th, 2025. Round 2: Submit a full proposal We encourage full proposals from teams that submitted a LoI and received a go recommendation in round 1. In addition to the project description, the proposals will include an itemized and justified budget and commitments of unit cost share. The full proposals will be up to 5 pages in length and IAI will shortly provide some guidance on how they should be structured as well as a reviewing rubric. These proposals will be submitted via UGA’s InfoReady system by November 15, 2025. IAI will then review the proposals and make awards expeditiously. We value your effort in making this seed grant program a success. We are grateful to the Office of the Provost and Office of Research for funding this program. Please consider leveraging other seed grant opportunities at UGA to amplify the outcomes of IAI’s seed grant. Please direct any questions to IAI's associate director for research, Kyle Johnsen. Thanks Kyle and Prashant
