Deadline: 17-July-22
Lacuna Fund is seeking proposals from organizations interested in developing datasets for equitable climate outcomes in climate & energy and climate & health.
Lacuna Fund provides data scientists, researchers, and social entrepreneurs with the resources they need to either produce new labeled datasets to address an underserved population or problem, augment existing datasets to be more representative, or update old datasets to be more sustainable.
Aims
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 philanthropic communities of how to fund development and maintenance of equitably labeled datasets most effectively and efficiently.
Focus Areas
- Climate & Health: The purpose of this call for proposals is to support efforts to develop open and accessible datasets for machine learning applications related to understanding and mitigating climate harms on health in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America
- Climate and Energy: The purpose of this Request for Proposals is to support efforts to develop open and accessible datasets for machine learning applications that will enable equitable climate and energy outcomes in Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and Latin America. Climate change disproportionately affects people in low and middle-income contexts who have done the least to contribute to it. Machine learning holds great promise to advance efforts across a variety of sectors to understand, mitigate, and adapt to climate change.
Funding Information
- Climate-and-Health
- The total pool available is approximately $1 million USD. They would like to fund at least one project in each of the target regions (Africa, Latin America, South and Southeast Asia) and anticipate supporting 4- 6 smaller projects with budgets between $50-100k and 2-3 larger, more complex projects with budgets ranging from $200-300k
- Climate-and-Energy
- The total pool available is approximately $2.5 million USD. They are anticipating proposed budgets in the range of $10k – 200k for small to medium-sized projects and up to $400k for large, complex projects.
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 strongly encouraged, but only the lead applicant will receive funds.
- Have a mission supporting societal good, broadly defined.
- Be headquartered in or have a substantial partnership in the country or region where data will be collected.
- Have all necessary national or other approvals to conduct the proposed research. The approval process may be conducted in parallel with the grant application, if necessary.
- Approval costs, if any, are the responsibility of the applicant.
- Have the technical capacity – or the ability to build this capacity through a partnership described in the proposal – to conduct dataset labeling, creation, aggregation, expansion, and/or maintenance, including the ability to apply best practice and established standards in the specific domain (e.g. climate changes, health impacts/outcomes) to allow high quality AI/ML analytics to be performed by multiple entities.
For more information, visit https://lacunafund.org/apply/