$100,000 to fund language technology innovators
Imminent was founded to help innovators who share the goal of making it easier for everyone living in our multilingual world to understand and be understood by all others.
Each year, Imminent will allocate $100,000 to fund five original research projects with grants of $20,000 each to explore the most advanced frontiers in the world of language services.
Imminent expects the call to appeal to startuppers, researchers, innovators, authors, university labs, organizations and companies. A committee made up of leading experts will evaluate the proposals.
For any questions related to the grants or your application, you can contact imminent@translated.com.
How to apply.
The form will include a 250-word summary to submit detailing the problem to be solved, the qualifications that make the proposer a suitable candidate to solve it, and the deliverables (paper, product, project, other – at this stage there are no specific rules about how to write the project: state of the art, detailed info concerning the materials and methods, and about its length)
The project can either be part of an existing research project on which you are already working or a standalone project focusing on one of the proposed topics.
The 2024 call is closed, 2025 call will open soon.
Funding criteria
5 grants – $20,000 each for 1 year.
After signing the grant agreement, Imminent will transfer 50% of the funds to the successful applicants. The remaining 50% of the approved funds will be paid out upon receipt of the final reports.
We will set dates for two milestones to follow up the project (these can be remote meetings).
Choose your topic
5 grants from these topics: Language economics – Linguistic data – Machine learning algorithms for translation – Human-computer interaction – The neuroscience of language.
Applications can be made in any field of research.
Who can apply
This call is open to startuppers, researchers, innovators, authors, university labs, organizations and companies.
Location
You can apply from anywhere in the world.
Submission deadline
March 31st, 2024. The 2024 call is closed, 2025 call will open soon.
Selection criteria
A committee of leading experts will evaluate the proposals.
Initially, 20 candidates will be selected for the second evaluation phase and will be asked to send more detailed description of the project and a 2 minutes video in which the researcher makes a short speech of his/her project. Candidates may be contacted for a 10-minute interview if the committee requires further information.
Participants will be asked to publish a paper about their project on the Imminent Research Center website within 1 year of the final presentation.
Background and context
Imminent is the Translated Research Center. Translated is on a mission to open up language to everyone, using a powerful combination of expert human translators and machine intelligence, and providing curated localization solutions and tools to 212,279 customers worldwide.
Our mission
We are on a mission to open up language to everyone. We want to live in a world where everyone can understand and be understood. We truly believe that an awareness of languages is an integral part of any respectful and open-minded approach to intercultural relations and that any international project can be improved if it has a way to express itself in the languages with which it seeks genuine contact.
Subjects
1. Subject: Language economics
Problem examples: The economic benefit of multilingualism, new indicators and models.
Alternative focus: Investment, planning, discovery, human resources management, supply chain management, international trade.
Opportunity: Improve management and entrepreneurship in a multilingual environment.
2. Subject: Linguistic data
Problem examples: How to collect and organise multilingual data, data cleaning algorithms, data collection, rare language collection, unbiasing.
Alternative focus: Data mining, knowledge management, data collection, web scraping, audio data, video data.
Opportunity: Improve the knowledge base upon which machine learning is developed.
3. Subject: Human-computer interaction
Problem examples: How to engage professional human translators in a symbiosis with machine translation, equitable incentives for human participation in the growth of machine translation, rational and emotional rewards, interface design, seamless human-computer interaction.
Alternative focus: Design, engagement, empowerment, interface, interaction, gamification.
Opportunity: Give value back to humans.
4. Subject: Neuroscience of language
Problem examples: How the brain works in language learning and translation.
Alternative focus: Experiments, theories, applications, neuroscience, psychology, social psychology.
Opportunity: How humans trust translations, how they open up to new languages, what is the difference between humans and machines in learning languages?
5. Subject: Machine learning algorithms for translation
Problem examples: How to improve the efficiency (quantity, quality, speed, adaptability, context awareness) of learning algorithms for machine translation.
Alternative focus: Machine learning, artificial intelligence, algorithms.
Opportunity: Support the creation of the next generation of machine technology.
Photo credit: Alina Grubnyak, Ben Sweet, Markus Spiske, Nathaniel Shuman, Joshua Sortino, Unsplash