Call for Proposal

Generative Artificial Intelligence Models (GAIMs) have emerged as transformative tools, driving advancements across diverse domains. However, their widespread adoption raises critical concerns regarding trustworthiness across dimensions such as truthfulness, safety, cybersecurity, fairness, robustness, and privacy. These models have demonstrated remarkable performance on knowledge reasoning tasks, owing to their implicit knowledge derived from extensive pretraining data. However, their inherent knowledge bases often suffer from disorganization and illusion, bias towards common entities, and rapid obsolescence. Consequently, GAIMs frequently make up untruthful information, exhibit resistance to updating outdated knowledge, or struggle with generalizing across multiple languages. 

Research topic areas

The ASKS Center is calling for proposals for the second funding round, 2025-2026 academic year. In this phase, the center will support 3-5 sponsored projects. Each funded project will support a PhD research assistant and 2-4 weeks of summer salary for principal investigators (PIs). Each selected project will then engage with research scientists from Capital One to collaborate and jointly advise PhD students.

• 1. Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision Language Models (VLMs) Safety
  2. Knowledge Systems
  3. CyberSecurity

Call for Proposal Process

• April 18, 2025: CFP Topics Announced
• May 9, 2025: Abstract Submission Deadline
• May 9 – May 31, 2025: Abstract feedback sessions with Capital One scientists and UIUC Faculty
• June 13, 2025: Full Proposal Submission Due
• Early July 2025: Full Proposal Acceptance Notification
• TBD September 2025 (On Campus ASKS Center Event)

Eligibility

• Eligibility: Full-time tenure-track, research-track and teaching faculty members at Illinois are eligible to submit proposals as PIs.
  Note: Faculty members that are Amazon Scholars are eligible to submit proposals but must adhere to university conflict of interest policies and procedures. These individuals are encouraged to consult the legal teams at their home departments well in advance of proposal submission.

Important Dates

• Abstract Submission Deadline: May 9, 2025