12 places will be opened for the 2025-2026 term, with a duration of 6 or 12 months at the applicant's option.
The intent of the fellowship is to focus on high risk research: ambitious projects that may not produce results, but will have lasting impact if they work.
We believe that publication in AI/ML has become overly biased towards short-term and iterative results, despite major gaps in our understanding of how to build optimal models.
The intent of these fellowships is to give awardees uninterrupted time to focus on harder open problems, with adequate compute, talented peers, and weekly 1:1 mentorship from senior researchers but without chasing specific metrics.
You will be expected to spend about 80% of your time on your own research, and up to 20% of your time either assisting other fellows or participating in wider research programs at IMI. We focus largely on applied research and its applications to online security problems, but often publish and support frontier research aligned with our broader interests. Serving hundreds of millions of people gives us a unique perspective as to what works at scale.
Eligibility: you may reside anywhere in the world, excluding sanctioned jurisdictions. This will be a remote fellowship.
Deliverables: we do not have hard targets, but generally try to get 1-2 papers with code done in a year, targeting NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, etc. At the end of your fellowship, if the threshold for publication at a conference or in a journal is unmet we will expect a final report, which may be published as a blog post.
Applying: send a brief bio / CV link via this page. Include 1) the topic you are interested in working on, 2) a few lines on any relevant prior work you've done, 3) your github / scholar / x links, 4) your desired start date, duration, and other obligations (if any) during that period, and 5) a brief analysis of one of the projects outlined below.
Each project intentionally includes some gaps or glosses. List the ones you see, and how you'd solve them. Alternatively, if you dislike the projects outlined under a particular topic, write up your own idea and why it is more promising, along with your estimate of time and compute required.
Requirements
Background as a researcher with prior fellowships or research staff experience from MSR, FAIR, Mila, MPI, etc., or self-taught mid-career engineers transitioning into research
Willing to reside anywhere in the world, excluding sanctioned jurisdictions