RFP for Artificial Intelligence for Earth Innovation

The National Geographic Society and Microsoft’s AI for Earth program have issued an RFP for novel projects that create and deploy AI tools to improve the way we monitor, model, understand, and ultimately manage Earth’s natural systems for a more sustainable future. Under the AI for Earth Innovation RFP, grants of up to $100,000 will be awarded in support of projects that use cloud computing to create and deploy open source trained models and algorithms that make key analytical processes more efficient in the environmental field. As an additional opportunity, Microsoft will help the successful proposals make the completed models available for use by other environmental researchers and innovators. In addition to financial support, successful proposals will receive free access to AI for Earth APIs, applications, tools, and tutorials, and support for their computational work on Microsoft Azure.

Projects should create generalizable, scalable tools that use AI for conservation in at least one of the core topic areas of biodiversity and climate change.

All models supported through the grant must be open source and grant recipients must be willing to publicly share their models for use by other environmental researchers.

See the National Geographic Society website for complete program guidelines, application instructions, and an example application.