Guidelines

Candidates are encouraged to submit an application including a research proposal describing candidates research interests or proposed projects, along with associated expenses up to $1500. Suggested use of funds include research equipments (Sensors, cameras, GPU, computers), software services, data annotations, surveys etc.

Proposal Review Guidelines

Below we have posted the reviewer guidelines to provide applicants as much transparency as possible about the review process. Before reviewers read any application for the program, they should know that:

• We have applicants from many different backgrounds since there is no degree, level, student/industry requirement for participation. We have applications ranging from high schoolers to postdocs, so reviewers will scale their expectations for proposals according to applicant’s academic history
• We might also have applicants who are non-native English speakers so reviewers will not judge applications based on grammar, sentence structure, and prose.
• We also asked applicants for a resume / CV, but there has been lots of research that shows resume bias exists, and so we ask that reviewers only read applicant’s resumes after they have read their proposal and ideally only use the resume to confirm details from the proposal and that applicant’s projects are feasible given their background.
• Furthermore, some of the research questions applicants are interested in exploring may be unfamiliar to reviewers or not seem like a “traditional” AI research topic, and that’s okay! Traditionally, AI research has been heavily white and male dominated, and this program is designed to empower Black women interested in research questions relevant to them and their communities, research questions that are oftentimes neglected or ignored by the rest of the AI community. If a reviewer is unfamiliar with a topic, we ask them to either do some background research or find someone who has expertise over the topic, but to not judge an applicant's proposal solely on whether it “looks like” a traditional AI research project or whether it is in a traditional AI space like computer vision or NLP.
• To reiterate, the kinds of projects BlackAIR is looking to fund are specific, feasible research ideas that applicants are interested and invested in. Therefore, reviewers should judge the merits of the proposal based on the scope of the project, the specifics of the proposal, the person's experience as related to the project, their perceived ability to complete the proposal, and the potential that the applicant’s participation will advance the visibility of Black women in AI.
• Finally, the essential question reviewers should ask themselves and answer in their review is: does the applicant have the necessary skills to execute this specific proposal with guidance from their mentor in the given timeframe?

Reviewer Criteria

In order to assist both the meta reviewers and the applicants, we request the following feedback from reviewers for each application. We would like proposals that are not accepted to have constructive feedback that helps the applicants improve their proposal for future submissions. We also ask for specific good points and points for improvement for meta reviewers to aid in participant selection process.