Criteo Faculty Research Award Program

What is the Criteo Faculty Research Award?

The Criteo Faculty Research Award funds leading machine learning research at universities, in order to improve collaboration between Criteo AI Lab and academic faculty, resulting in work that will be made available to the external machine learning community by publishing papers and/or open-sourcing any technology that is developed. The award is provided as an unrestricted gift to the university.

Who is eligible to apply for the award?

We accept applications from full-time faculty members from universities that conduct research in machine learning & related fields and award PhD degrees to students working in that domain. Here is a list of our awardees for 2017.

Applicants whose proposals were rejected in previous years are welcome to apply again in future years.

What is the selection process?

Project proposals are reviewed by an internal committee of machine learning research scientists. Applicants will be notified of the selection committee’s decision within a month of submitting their proposals. In order to maximize one’s chances of acceptance, applicants are encouraged to collaborate with scientists at Criteo AI Lab who can champion the proposal.

What are the expectations of the academic investigators (selected faculty member & associated students)?

If selected, academic investigators will be assigned a Criteo AI Lab contact who will be their liaison during the course of the collaboration. The academic investigator is encouraged to maintain contact with their liaison to provide updates on progress and research challenges that are being addressed. The academic investigators are also strongly encouraged to publish the results of their findings in peer-reviewed international conferences or journals and  open source any software developed during the course of this research.

We also require the academic investigators to attribute funding support to Criteo AI Lab when publishing/open-sourcing their work or disseminating findings from the funded projects in other non peer-reviewed forums/publications.

The academic investigators may also be requested to present their findings at internal Criteo conferences/workshops. The cost of travel to such internal conferences will be paid for by Criteo independent of the award.

What is the submission requirement?

The academic investigators are encouraged to submit a proposal (maximum of 4 pages in the standard ACM format) detailing the following:

• Contact information
• Description of the research to be conducted
  • Title
  • Motivation for solving the research challenge and its applicability to Criteo.
  • Outline of the proposed approach & expected results
  • Prior/related work with references
  • Format of synchronization with the Criteo liaison
  • Specific outcome of this work: conferences targeted, software release process etc.
• Proposed budget:
  • In your application, please provide a budget breakdown with expected costs. Criteo will not pay for overhead costs that are incurred as a consequence of this award.
  • If you intend to use this funding in addition to funding sourced from elsewhere, please note this in your application.
• CV of the academic investigators.
• Names of the Criteo AI Lab Scientists who can champion your proposal.
• Please submit your applications to research-award@criteo.com. You may also email us with questions related to the award.

NOTE: For academics based in France, this year we are partnering with the Hadamard Foundation to disseminate our grant money. So, please follow only the process as detailed in the Research Initiative on Recommendation Methods (IRMER).

Application deadline: May 11th, 2018 AOE

Acceptance notification: June 8th, 2018

What happens after the selection process?

We will send out notifications of selected applicants within two months of the application deadline and initiate the process to send over the award payment.  We will not be able to provide feedback on individual applications.

Note:  Payments are made in accordance to relevant US and international laws, regulations and policies. Criteo reserves the right to withhold funding that may violate laws, regulations or our policies and to ask for additional information.