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The Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship funds and mentors graduate students pursuing technical research aligned with Qualcomm's core innovation areas, and artificial intelligence has become the program's dominant theme — recent North American winning proposals include work on democratizing chip design with on-device small language models as assistants and agents, building helpful embodied AI agents with long-horizon understanding, training a generally curious personal agent that learns what to remember and what to ask, physically grounded world modeling through controllable visual generative models, and state-space world models for intelligent radio access networks.
Each fellowship carries $40,000 for a one-year term plus mentorship from a Qualcomm engineer, and the program runs parallel competitions in five regions: North America, Europe, India, South Korea, and East Asia. Qualcomm receives more than 380 proposals annually and funds 45 or more fellows; the selection process moves from written proposal review by Qualcomm R&D engineers to a finalist presentation before executive judges.
Deadlines, eligible institution lists, and team-size rules differ by region, so applicants should work from the region-specific program page.
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Or search similar grants →According to the current listing, eligibility includes: PhD and Masters students at a preselected list of top universities in each participating region; the institution list and team composition rules vary by region (North America, Europe, India, South Korea, East Asia). Students apply as proposal teams rather than through institutional nomination, and must be enrolled for the duration of the fellowship year. Confirm the full requirements in the official notice before applying.
The current listing shows $40,000 per fellowship for a one-year term, awarded to the student team's proposed research project. Qualcomm has awarded more than $20 million through the program since 2009 and funds 45 or more fellows annually across all regions. Verify award ceilings, matching requirements, and allowable costs in the official notice.
Qualcomm Innovation Fellowship (QIF) for Graduate Research in Artificial Intelligence and Embodied AI Agents is funded by Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.. Verify program details on the funder's official page before applying.
Start from the official opportunity page linked in this listing — it carries the sponsor's submission instructions.
The Merck Stimulating Innovative Research Grant Program 2026 includes a dedicated grant topic for artificial intelligence in cell culture media and process development, offering up to EUR 150,000 per year for up to 3 years. The program accelerates innovation through collaborative research, early engagement with industry experts, and translation of novel ideas into practical solutions. In 2026, priority areas also include in-vitro models for neuroinflammatory diseases (EUR 250,000/year for 2 years) and innovative approaches to contaminated materials remediation (EUR 150,000/year for 2 years). The two-stage application process begins with non-confidential submissions, followed by deep-dive workshops where finalists collaborate with Merck scientists and managers to jointly optimize proposals. The AI-specific grant focuses on applying machine learning and AI to optimize cell culture media formulation, bioprocess parameter optimization, and manufacturing quality control.
The Sony Research Award Program is Sony's principal channel for funding external academic research, and the Focused Research Award is its collaborative track: up to 150,000 dollars for focused joint research between a university or research institute and Sony. The 2026 research areas are unusually broad for a corporate program and cover most of the modern AI stack alongside Sony's hardware interests - AI and large language models, computer vision, machine learning, robotics, human-computer interaction, affective computing, speech and language technologies, audio technologies, RF sensing, wireless communications, cybersecurity, sports technology, digital humans, generative AI, content creation and neural rendering, plus device-level areas including MicroLED and optical metasurfaces. For AI and robotics groups this makes it one of the wider corporate calls available, though the breadth is deceptive: Sony funds work that connects to its own research agenda, and proposals are strongest when there is an identifiable Sony research counterpart for the collaboration. Eligibility is tightly drawn around the principal investigator rather than the institution. The PI must be a full-time faculty member or researcher at a recognized institution - Assistant Professor, Associate Professor, Professor or equivalent researcher - and must be able to supervise PhD students. Co-PIs are permitted but must be from the same institution and meet the same requirements, which rules out the cross-institutional consortia common in public funding. The 2026 deadline is 15 September 2026 at 11:59pm Pacific, with a separate India-specific time given as 16 September 2026. Submission guidelines are on the Sony Research Award Program site.
The Sony Research Award Program is Sony's principal academic collaboration instrument, and the Focused Research Award track funds joint work between university faculty and Sony Research on a published list of specific problems rather than open-ended investigator-defined topics. The 2026 cycle carries ten focus areas, most of which sit squarely in modern AI: internal mechanisms of multimodal generative models for content creation, knowledge representation and reasoning for graph-based modelling, psychology-informed user modelling for content streaming, post-training of speech language models, AI-powered visual technology, digital human content creation for sports, provenance proofs for AI-generated derivative content, and long-term memory for sequential decision-making in gaming. Awards are up to 150,000 dollars per year for a one-year research period with possible renewal, paid as a single all-inclusive sum. Because the tracks are tightly specified, the decisive factor in a competitive proposal is demonstrable alignment with the named focus area and with the Sony research group that owns it - a strong proposal against an adjacent problem generally does worse than a merely good proposal against the stated one. Eligibility is restricted to full-time professors or researchers qualified to supervise PhD students; adjunct faculty and professors emeritus are excluded. The 2026 application deadline is 15 September 2026.
America's Seed Fund powered by NSF reopened for FY2026 with two parallel solicitations: NSF 26-510 for deep technologies and a new pilot, NSF 26-511, dedicated to scientific instrumentation. Project Pitch is the mandatory first gate, the first full-proposal deadline is July 27, 2026, and Phase I runs up to $305K. Here is how the topic-agnostic NSF model differs from agency-directed SBIR — and how to use the new pilot.
Read articleOn June 3, 2026, four DARPA Biological Technologies Office SBIR topics close simultaneously — SWiFT, BARK, EXPOSITION, and Medical Swarm Robotics. Combined Phase I plus Phase II potential exceeds $6 million per company, and together they sketch a coherent strategy of distributed, autonomous, dual-species combat casualty care that depends on small businesses, not primes, to actually build.
Read articleDPA26BZ06-DV026 offers $300,000 at Phase I or $1,800,000 as a single Direct-to-Phase-II tranche with no options. The deliverable is a simulated auction market that measures whether AI agents deceive, collude, or manipulate the humans they serve — measured entirely from the outside. Here is the 90% efficiency gate, the team composition most bidders will get wrong, and why this topic sits in DARPA's biology office.
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