Research

Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world, and to share and express what matters to them. We create spoken language technology to make it faster and simpler for people to build community and connect with others around the world. We invest in video content understanding to make it simpler for people to discover the content that matters to them.

We are pleased to announce a call for research proposals for speech & audio technology that advances the state-of-the-art in human-computer interaction, human-human interaction, and video content understanding.

Applicants from the academic community should submit a two-page proposal outlining their intended research, a budget overview, and an estimated timeline.

Awards will range from $20,000 to $50,000 USD per proposal for projects up to one year in duration beginning August 2018. Successful proposals will demonstrate innovative and compelling research that has the potential to significantly advance the state of the art. Award amounts will be determined at the discretion of the evaluation committee. Participants need to be prepared to show milestone completion and present results at the halfway mark (February 2019). Up to 5 projects will be awarded.

Representatives from each awarded project will be invited to a workshop with other participants in October 2018, and are expected to attend an evaluation meeting in February 2019. Opportunities for a second round of funding will be determined at the February meeting. Travel costs to attend these meetings to Menlo Park, CA, USA should be included in the proposed budget. Award recipients will be listed on the Facebook Research website and will be encouraged to openly publish any findings from their work as well as make any code available as open source.