The NIH Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) announces the availability of funds for Administrative Supplements to active NIH grants that have a significant Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) and/or ethics component. The funds will support collaborations that bring together expertise in ethics, biomedicine, data collection, and AI/ML to advance the understanding, tools, metrics, and practices for the ethical development and use of AI/ML in biomedical and behavioral sciences. This initiative is aligned with the NIH Strategic Plan for Data Science, which describes actions aimed at modernizing the biomedical research data ecosystem. For the purposes of this Notice, AI/ML is inclusive of machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and neural network (NN) techniques employed in distributed, federated, local, or cloud environments.
Applicants are strongly encouraged to discuss potential requests with their Institute/Center (IC) Program Official before submitting the supplemental request.
The goal of this Notice of Special Interest (NOSI) is to support new collaborations to advance the ethical development and use of AI/ML in biomedical and behavioral research. Significant expertise in AI/ML and ethics are expected to be needed to identify and address concerns about the human and clinical impacts of AI/ML technologies in biomedicine. Ethical expertise may be derived from a range of related disciplines such as philosophy, socio-economic research, history, legal scholarship, ethics in clinical research, and behavioral psychology. Experts in AI/ML may have backgrounds in computer science, data science, or informatics. NIH seeks to encourage participation by early-career ethicists through this opportunity; thus, proposals engaging collaborators at the postdoctoral level to provide ethical expertise will be considered appropriate.
These funded collaborations are intended to generate new understanding, practices, tools, techniques, metrics, or resources that will aid others in making ethical decisions throughout the development and use of AI/ML, which includes the collection and generation of data as well as the reuse of data and models by others. NIH expects that the research products developed under this NOSI, including best practices, datasets, models, and research findings, will be shared and made broadly reusable.
Application Due Date(s) –Thursday March 31st, 2022
NOT-OD-22-065