Creating a Competitive Application
The American Family Funding Initiative hosts a number of events designed to help applicants create competitive proposals.
Topics of Interest
Topics of interest to American Family include, but are not limited to, the following areas:
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Foundational AI
- Computer vision
- NLP, NU
- Explainable AI
- Deep learning architectures
- Human in the loop
- Few-shot learning
- Recommender systems
- Unsupervised learning
- Clustering techniques related to territorial ratemaking
- Adversarial AI
- Reinforcement learning and bandits
Fraud, insurance risk, marketing and claims analytics
- Claims fraud detection
- Optimal pricing models
- Customer retention and valuation models
- Real-time risk prediction during catastrophic events
- Digital underwriting
- Novel approaches to pricing
- Portfolio risk management
Signal processing and data fusion
- Internet of Things applications
- Speech recognition
- Aerial and satellite imagery: Drones, GIS
- Temporal data analytics
- Autonomous vehicles
- Weather prediction/forecasting modeling
- AI model monitoring
Bias, ethics and robustness, model impact
- Bias and ethics in AI models
- Techniques for understanding disparate impact without data on protected classes
- Bias and ethics in human-driven processes
- Model robustness
- AI governance and transparency
- Frameworks for determining the AI models’ financial impact (CBA)
Robotic process automation
- Customer service automation
- Conversational AI
- Automated Data Extraction
Optimization and operations research
- Scalable optimization
- Optimal decision-making
Knowledge representation
- Knowledge-driven information extraction
- Data-driven knowledge construction/expansion
- Inference in knowledge graphs
- Metadata organization and management
Data management and integration
- Entity matching
- Data cleaning
- Automation of data workflows
- Advances in ETL/ELT
- Efficient data storage and retrieval
Behavioral economics and applied cognitive science
- Cognitive bias identification
- Information overload
- Customer decision making
- Prospect theory and loss aversion (How customers make decisions)
- Neuroeconomics
- Computational cognitive models
Quantum computing
- AI quantum algorithms
- Cybersecurity and cryptography
- QC approaches to optimization
- QC-based weather forecasting
Grants Awarded
Teams of UW-Madison faculty and collaborators have received support through the American Family Funding Initiative for data science projects ranging from furthering third-wave artificial intelligence to supporting student entrepreneurship.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and data science are becoming a core component of the insurance industry, motivated by the increasing availability of data, including masses of unstructured data, scalable cloud computing, exponential growth in computing power, new modeling tools, and the ongoing drive for operational efficiency and cost reduction. An industry that has been traditionally led by predictive analytics and risk assessment is moving to a whole new level of accuracy and customer experience through AI. Some of the applications of AI in insurance include: claims management, retention analysis, customer experience enhancement, risk analysis, fraud mitigation, policy pricing, and customer acquisition. With big data and new data sources, such as social media, Internet of Things (IoT), telematics, web logs, video and images, and clickstreams, the opportunity to apply artificial intelligence has never been greater across areas of insurance operation.
American Family has partnered with UW through the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute (DSI) to offer this unique opportunity. DSI is committed to working with researchers in all disciplines on campus and encourages anyone interested to apply. If you have questions or would like to discuss your project, please contact research@datascience.wisc.edu.
APPLY FOR FUNDING
American Family Insurance is interested in sponsoring research and applications of data science, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) directly or indirectly relevant to the insurance industry. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, those listed on the left.
DEADLINES
The Round 4 application window closed on March 11. We will open the next round of funding in January 2023.
ELIGIBILITY
UW–Madison faculty and academic staff with permanent PI status are eligible to apply. CHS faculty and academic staff without permanent PI status may participate in applications as co-PIs or co-investigators.
ABOUT THE APPLICATION PROCESS
Beginning in 2022, this initiative provides one year of project support, with awards averaging about $75,000. The maximum annual award is $100,000. PIs have the option to apply for a second year of funding for a project. No-cost extensions will only be granted under special circumstances.
The recommended start date for funded projects is September 1, 2022. American Family supports projects with both funding and data scientists. Keeping projects on schedule ensures American Family’s data scientists are available to support all projects and PIs.
Applications should explicitly address innovation, significance, risk, and impact. Each proposal will be evaluated according to the following criteria:
- Potential impact to fundamental and/or applied data science
- Novelty of methodological approach, either through applications or foundations
- Alignment with AmFam topics of interest
- Overall quality of the proposal
Detailed instructions for proposal creation and submission are available HERE.
View past awards HERE.
Questions? Read our FAQ HERE.
MASTER RESEARCH AGREEMENT
UW-Madison PIs who are applying to the American Family Funding Initiative may wish to review the UW’s Master Research Agreement with American Family Insurance, and finalists will be required to review this agreement. Please complete this form to request access to this document.