Opportunity
To make progress on the major social issues in society, Facebook is partnering with universities to support them in building open-source datasets on which the community can measure the progress of existing techniques to reduce misleading behavior online.
The goal of this RFP is to help the academic community to address problems in the area of safer online conversations. This includes problems around misinformation, as well as hate speech and inauthentic online behavior, to name a few. The grant aims to provide funding for projects that build research infrastructure such as datasets or evaluation platforms that can accelerate research in a broader way. In particular, we are encouraging:
- The creation of a publicly available benchmark and analysis platform that enables the community to compare and understand models that address problems in the area of safer online conversations. An example of an existing platform (but outside that area) is General Language Understanding Evaluation, a.k.a. GLUE, which subsumes existing NLP datasets, provides online evaluation tools and leaderboards, and specific diagnostic evaluation data to test specific system properties.
- The creation of publicly available datasets to improve the state-of-the-art of models for safer online conversations. Examples are fake news datasets, such as BuzzFeedNews or LIAR, rumor propagation datasets such as the Kaggle Rumor Tracker Dataset or offending content datasets like the MS Offensive Language Dataset.
Eligibility
- Awards must comply with applicable US and international laws, regulations, and policies.
- Applicants must be current full-time faculty at an accredited academic institution that awards research degrees to PhD students.
- Applicants must be the Principal Investigator on any resulting award.
- Applicants may submit one proposal per applicant.
- Organizations must be a nonprofit or non-governmental organization with recognized legal status in their respective country (equal to 501(c)(3) status under the United States Internal Revenue Code).
Funding Available
The funding can range from $10K to $50K, depending on the proposal, but should roughly match the cost of annotation, e.g. using a crowdsourcing annotation platform or paying expert annotators.
Useful Links
- For further details about funding categories, eligibility criteria and deadlines, click here.
Deadlines
| Internal Review | Proposal development will be initially provided by the appropriate Faculty Research Facilitator, with additional support and substantive review provided by the Manager, International Projects |
| cuResearch Approval Form | June 13, 2019 |
| Submission to Sponsor | June 20, 2019, 5 p.m. PST |
Submitting Your Application
- Applications must be submitted via cuResearch, through which Departmental and Associate Dean’s approval must be provided to complete the online application process.
- More information on cuResearch can be found here.
Internal Contacts
Proposal development will be initially provided by the appropriate Faculty Research Facilitator, with additional support and substantive review provided by the Manager, International Projects