Award for inclusion research program
Overview
The Award for Inclusion Research Program recognizes and supports academic research in computing and technology that addresses the needs of historically marginalized groups globally.
Launched in 2020, the Award for Inclusion Research (AIR) Program is an ongoing effort to support innovative research and professors working to create positive societal impact.
Application status
Applications are currently closed.
Decisions for the 2023 application cycle have been announced. Please check back for details on future application cycles.
Research areas
Accessibility research is critical in its opportunity to advance inclusive technology that can enable and improve access for diverse user populations. Google's mission to "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful emphasizes the importance of accessibility at the company-level. Google works on a broad range of topics in accessibility to ensure that our technology is accessible and that it empowers people with disabilities to be socially engaged, productive, and independent. We are committed to research that advances the state-of-the-art in usable, useful, inclusive, and accessible technology.
Google strives for broad inclusion through support for assistive technologies, and research and development that aid people with vision, hearing, speech, motor, and/or cognitive disabilities.
For our program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
- Wearable computing and augmentative technology
- Inclusive remote communication and telepresence to aid in collaboration among people with and without disabilities
- Transportation and mobility
- Tools and techniques for cognitive inclusion
Collaboration is responsible for far-reaching advances in computing. For example, such collaboration can occur in online communities like Wikipedia, open source software development projects, or teams of information workers in companies. Diverse and inclusive collaborations can create technology and products that are more inclusive of all users.
For our program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
- Collaboration strategies to ensure that technological solutions meet the needs of a diverse set of users
- Scalable and repeatable interventions to help avoid technological solutions that might cause harm to historically marginalized and underserved communities
- Mitigating bias among collaborative teams
- Increasing belonging in collaborative teams
Collective & society-centered AI research at Google builds upon traditions of multidisciplinary research. A community-collaborative approach actively involves impacted stakeholders throughout the application, system, or service design process to ensure their needs are met and can lead to AI systems that have a higher potential to benefit the community. The hallmark of these projects is that these will involve at least two stakeholder groups collaborating. Stakeholder groups include: researchers, developers, creators, end-users, community organizations, governments, citizens, and others.
For our program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
- AI innovations for societal needs: transparency, work, education, collaboration, safety, quality, human-machine collaboration. Impact on creative community & regulation.
- AI integration with society: sociotechnical investigations of adoption, data, attitudes, responsible AI, & marginalized communities.
- AI development lifecycle: novel tools, infrastructure, and methods for collaboration, governance, and impact assessment.
As we look towards the future of computing education, artificial intelligence (AI) is set to transform learning, teaching and assessment. At Google, we are committed to ensuring that the benefits of new technologies are universally accessible and useful. Given the current inequities in the computing education ecosystem, it is critical to support academic research on how and to what extent AI will impact computing in primary, secondary and higher education (at a systems-level) and pedagogical innovation.
For our program, we call for proposals specifically in the areas of:
- Examination of system-level effects of generative AI on K-16 computing education.
- Investigation of the effects of generative AI tools on pedagogy and learning, both opportunities and risks.
- Assessment of scalable models of educator professional development that incorporate generative AI tools.
- Exploration of foundational skills and knowledge students will need in computing education enabled by generative AI tools.
Award details
We encourage submissions from professors globally who are teaching at universities and meet the eligibility requirements. The AIR Program funds topics including accessibility, impact of AI on education, collaboration, collective & society-centered AI and gender bias, and many other areas that aim to have a positive impact on underrepresented groups.
- The funds granted will be up to $60,000 USD and are intended to support the advancement of the professor’s research during the academic year in which the award is provided.
- Awards are disbursed as unrestricted gifts to the university and are not intended for overhead or indirect costs.
Eligibility criteria
- Open to professors (assistant, associate, etc) at a university or degree-granting research institution.
- Applicant may only serve as Principal Investigator (PI) or co-PI on one proposal per round. There can be a maximum of 2 PIs per proposal.
- Proposals must be related to computing or technology.
- Proposed research must impact users from historically marginalized groups. The definition of who is historically marginalized is responsive to a specific region, context, and its nuances; the proposal should define the users from historically marginalized groups the research aims to impact, and how the research will address their needs.
Strong proposals demonstrate a clear understanding of the users from historically marginalized groups the research aims to impact, such as direct collaboration with the users in the research process, describing the relationship of the PI(s) to the users/research, and describing the motivation to pursue the research.
Review criteria
Faculty merit
What is your prior research work? Are you qualified through your prior research experience to conduct the proposed research? Have you done preliminary research to show your investment in this space?
Broader impact & research merit
What is the impact of this research work being done successfully? Is it innovative? Could it change the academic landscape if successful? Do you have resources to conduct the research at hand?
Proposal quality
Is the proposal clear, focused and follows guidelines? Is it easy to navigate and how do you plan to approach the research problem? Do you provide further documentation as needed?
FAQs
The program is open to active professors at degree-granting institutions who are advising students and conducting research.
Below is an example of what a proposal may look like (though the relative length of each section may differ by proposal). The full proposal should be a maximum of 5 pages:
- [Maximum 3 Pages] The proposal overview, proposal body, and data policy.
- [Maximum 2 Pages] The CV of the primary Principal Investigator, which is required for all applications.
We would prefer proposals to respect a minimum 10pt font size and 1-inch (2.5-cm) margins. Our reviewers value readability.
- Overview
- Proposal Title
- Principal Investigator full name, contact information (postal address, email address, phone), affiliation (university, school, college and/or department)
- Proposal Body
- Abstract
- Research goals and problem statement
- Description of the work you'd like to do, and expected outcomes and results.
- How will your research impact an underrepresented group?
- How does your research relate to prior work in the area (including your own, if relevant)? What makes you qualified to do this research work?
- References, where applicable.
- Data policy
- Our goal is to support work where the output will be made available to the broader research community. To that end, we ask that you provide us with a few sentences sharing what you intend to do with the output of your project (e.g. open sourcing code, making data sets public, etc.). Please note that the awards are structured as unrestricted gifts, so there are no legal requirements once a project is selected for funding. This is simply a statement of your current intentions.
- CV format for the principal investigator(s)
- We require a CV for at least the primary Principal Investigator on the proposal. We will accept CVs from each of the Principal Investigators listed on the proposal (up to two are allowed). Each CV must be limited to two pages. Any submitted CV that is longer than 2 pages may be cut off at 2 pages before the proposal review process begins.
Please do not add a budget section on your proposal since it will not be considered.
Yes, we have a miscellaneous area in the application. Feel free to submit a proposal in any research area, in computing and technology, that addresses the needs of historically marginalized groups globally.
Yes, the co-PI must meet the same eligibility criteria as the primary PI. We are providing an exception if the co-PI is a postdoctoral researcher.
No, proposals should only be focused on higher education.
This is not applicable for the AIR program unless the proposal studies the efficacy and applies research to the larger program.
As a part of the group of engineers that review proposals for this program, we read a lot of proposals. We'd like to read more good proposals. Here's some advice on how you can improve the content of your short proposal and make reviewing it easier.
A good research grant proposal:
Clearly specifies a problem. Good research is driven by a great problem or question, and a good proposal starts with a clearly specified one.
- Describes a specific, credible, relevant outcome. Try to identify a specific and appropriately sized outcome, to give us a clear notion of what the research award would be enabling. What will likely come to be that might otherwise not happen? While this outcome should be a decisive step towards achieving your vision, it generally won't be adequate to completely achieve it. It often helps to describe both the minimum that is likely to be accomplished and a potential best-case. Since picking the right datasets and test cases is often important, tell us which ones you plan to use.
- Crisply differentiates the proposed contribution from prior work. Please apply normal practices (citations, etc.) for documenting how your work will materially advance the state of the art. Make it clear how your work will be changing the state of the art, and not simply trying to match it.
- Tells us how the research challenge(s) will be addressed. Successful research projects combine a great problem with ideas for solutions, too. We recognize that all the answers won't be known yet, but we'd like to feel that the direction has been established, and a plausible path has been identified. (Try to avoid proposals of the form "We want to look at problem X".) It's hard to have a big impact without taking risks, but please identify what the difficulties are likely to be and how you plan to mitigate them. It may help to explain how you succeeded in addressing analogous problems in other projects.
- Puts the proposed work in context. Most projects we fund also have support from other sources. To help us understand the expected impact of Google support, please explain what funding you already have for this area of research and how the proposed work relates to your existing plans. Do you plan to build a capability for other research, provide a tool, reproduce a prior result, collaborate with others to try something out, follow up on a promising idea, or explore a new one? All are potentially of interest; we just want to know.
- Makes the case to a non-expert. While we try to have your proposal reviewed by a Google expert in your field, it will also be read by non-experts, so please make at least the motivation and outcomes broadly accessible.
- Tells us how this research impacts an underserved community and why you are qualified to do this research. It can be through social, cultural, or regional expertise, specifically related to the research to conduct successful work.
- The proposal should show promise that it will benefit society or advance desired societal outcomes.
Award recipients
