Deadline: 3-Sep-21
Lacuna Fund seeks Expressions of Interest from organizations interested in responding to a call for proposals to unlock, create, aggregate, and/or improve labeled datasets that will be essential to train and improve machine learning (ML) models needed for sustainable transformation of the agri-food systems in sub-Saharan Africa.
Lacuna Fund aims to make its funding accessible to as many organizations as possible in the AI for social good space and cultivate capacity and emerging organizations in the field.
Focus Areas
The Steering Committee of Lacuna Fund: The Voice on Data has identified the following areas as domains where a lack of labeled training data limits the potential of machine learning or presents the risk of bias or inequity.
- Agriculture
- Enabling new and more robust AI applications through remote sensing and other critical datasets.
- Language
- Translation, speech recognition, and other datasets to enable the promise of digital communication for all.
- Health
- Improving the robustness and availability of AI solutions in healthcare through datasets across the value chain.
Purpose and Goals
Lacuna Fund supports the creation, expansion, and maintenance of equitably labeled datasets that enable the robust application of machine learning (ML) tools of high social value in low- and middle-income contexts globally. The Fund aims to:
- Disburse funds to institutions to create, expand, and/or maintain datasets that fill gaps and reduce bias in labeled data used for the training and/or evaluation of machine learning models.
- Make it possible for underserved populations to take advantage of advances offered by AI.
- Deepen understanding by the machine learning and philanthropy communities of how to fund development and maintenance of equitably labeled datasets most effectively and efficiently.
Funding Information
- The total pool available is approximately USD 800,000.
- They plan to fund projects with a maximum budget of USD 200,000.
Eligibility Criteria
To be eligible for funding, organizations must:
- Be either a non-profit entity, research institution, for-profit social enterprise, or a team of such organizations. Individuals must apply through an institutional sponsor. Partnerships are welcome but only the lead applicant will receive funds.
- Have a mission supporting societal good, broadly defined.
- Have all necessary national or other approvals to conduct proposed research. The approval process may be conducted in parallel with grant application, if necessary. Approval costs, if any, are the responsibility of the applicant.
- Have the technical capacity to conduct dataset labeling, creation, expansion, and/or maintenance.
- Be sufficiently stable to ensure the sustainability of the dataset or have arrangements with an organization of sufficient stability.
For more information, visit https://lacunafund.org/apply/