The Innovation Institute, a division of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative is issuing this Notice of Funding Opportunity for the Massachusetts AI Models Innovation Challenge, to solicit responses from qualified firms interested in receiving grant funding to develop artificial intelligence models that can have a transformative impact on some of the most pressing challenges facing society or industries of regional importance within Massachusetts.
Donor Name: Massachusetts Technology Collaborative
State: Massachusetts
County: All Counties
Type of Grant: Awards and Prizes
Deadline: 02/28/2025
Size of the Grant: $500,000 to $1 million
Grant Duration: 2 Years
Details:
The Massachusetts AI Models Innovation Challenge is a grant program designed to inspire the development of domain-specific AI models capable of catalyzing scientific discoveries, accelerating commercialization of AI applications or generating substantial public benefits. The Challenge seeks to fund projects that develop, fine-tune or adapt AI models to unlock breakthroughs in priority industry sectors with potential for significant downstream applications within the next three years.
Priority will be given to Respondents developing models targeting complex societal challenges or innovations in one of Massachusetts’ priority industry sectors including healthcare, life sciences, financial services, robotics, advanced manufacturing, climate tech, or education.
Use cases of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Healthcare: clinical decision support, patient care, public health management
- Life Sciences: drug discovery, genomics, diagnostics
- Financial Services: fraud detection, underwriting, wealth management
- Robotics: autonomous navigation, human-robot interaction, precision manipulation
- Advanced Manufacturing: Digital twins for prototypes, predictive maintenance, supply chain optimization
- Climate Tech: carbon reduction, energy efficiency, sustainable materials
- Education & Society: personalized learning, workforce development, public-interest technology.
This funding opportunity is designed to support Respondents at various stages across the lifecycle of AI model development, from data acquisition to deployment. Depending on the nature of proposed projects, awardees may be expected to carry out the following activities:
- Data Collection and Preparation: Collect or generate datasets for model training, ensuring data quality through cleaning, preprocessing, and appropriate structuring. Collaborate with data partners to overcome challenges of data fragmentation and privacy.
- Training & Fine-Tuning: Train novel foundation models or fine-tune existing open-source models to address specific use-cases. Select appropriate models, train them with domain-specific data, and iteratively optimize performance. Emphasis should be placed on cost-effective model development to achieve robust performance.
- Model Evaluation and Deployment: Evaluate the model’s effectiveness using validation datasets, ensuring accuracy, fairness, and explainability. Deploy the model in a real or simulated environment, adhering to best practices for ethical AI and user-centric design.
- Collaboration and Partnership: Engage with stakeholders, such as academic institutions, industry partners, and community organizations, to enhance project impact. This collaboration is crucial to align the solution with user needs and to share methodologies with the broader AI community.
- Contribute to Open-Source Resources: Where possible, contribute findings, datasets, or refined models to open-source communities, creating shared resources that benefit broader AI innovation efforts.
- Practice Ethical and Responsible AI: Adhere to ethical AI principles, focusing on fairness, accountability, and transparency. Ensure that privacy concerns are addressed, and measures are taken to mitigate risks of unintended biases.
- Periodic Reporting: submit periodic reports to MassTech providing updates on project progress, achievements, and any challenges encountered. Reports will include metrics that track the project’s development, including milestones, data collection progress, model performance, collaboration efforts, and other relevant indicators.
Funding Information
Respondents can request funding of up to $1,000,000.
Grant Period
It is expected funds will be expensed over 12-24 months and used towards the curation of high-quality datasets; training of an AI model; demonstration of the model’s performance against defined benchmarks; documentation of compliance with ethical guidelines, regulations, and privacy standards; and a deployment plan supported by collaborative partnerships.
Eligibility Criteria
The lead or primary applicant must be a college, university, non-profit research institution, or other nonprofit entity legally organized in Massachusetts.
For more information, visit Massachusetts Technology Collaborative.
