Cyber and AI Clinic Grants (Maryland)

Rural Texas Strong Initiative 5: Unified Care Infrastructure and Rural Cyber Protection is sponsored by Texas Health and Human Services Commission (HHSC). This initiative focuses on managed security services, endpoint detection and response, continuous security operations center monitoring, cybersecurity training, and threat detection for rural healthcare organizations. While primarily cybersecurity-focused, strong proposals could integrate AI for threat detection relevant to clinical care.

SCH is the flagship joint NSF-NIH programme for biomedical AI, and its defining characteristic is that it is jointly written, jointly reviewed and jointly funded - proposals are assessed once by a panel drawn from both agencies rather than being shopped between them. Three NSF directorates and more than twenty NIH Institutes and Centers participate, which gives the programme unusually wide subject coverage. The purpose is to support transformative high-risk, high-reward advances in computer and information science, engineering, mathematics, statistics and behavioural or cognitive research that address pressing questions in the biomedical and public health communities. Core themes include fairness and trustworthiness in AI and machine learning applied to health, advanced analytics for biomedical and behavioural research, multimodal sensing systems for health monitoring, cyber-physical systems for health intervention automation, robotics for healthcare support, and biomedical image interpretation informed by human perception research. The requirement that most often sinks otherwise strong proposals is structural rather than scientific: a project must make fundamental scientific or engineering contributions to two or more disciplines, and must include a mandatory collaboration plan. An application that advances clinical practice by applying existing machine learning methods, without a methodological contribution back to computing, fails that test regardless of clinical merit. The programme now operates on twice-yearly target dates rather than hard deadlines, with target dates falling in early September and early February.