BNY–CMU AI Lab: Reliable, Responsible, and Resilient AI for Mission-Critical Systems
Request for Proposals

The BNY–CMU AI Lab invites Carnegie Mellon University faculty to submit proposals for one-year research projects supporting PhD students or postdoctoral researchers aligned with the Lab’s mission of advancing Reliable, Responsible, and Resilient (RRR) Agentic AI for mission-critical systems.

Scope of Interest

Proposals should advance the scientific and engineering foundations of trustworthy autonomous AI, particularly in areas including:

• Autonomous agent verification and constraint enforcement
• Evaluation science and stress testing for agentic systems
• Multi-agent coordination, incentive alignment, and mechanism design
• System-level robustness and failure cascade modeling
• Continual and adaptive learning under governance constraints
• Responsible AI by design (auditability, traceability, calibrated uncertainty, human-in-the-loop oversight)
• Secure deployment, adversarial resilience, and model update integrity

Projects are strongly encouraged to engage with the current state of the art in large models and agentic systems and to address challenges that arise in real-world, mission-critical environments.

Interdisciplinary collaborations across machine learning, systems, robotics, security, economics, public policy, and human-computer interaction are particularly encouraged.

Funding & Structure

All selected proposals will receive a fixed amount of $100K or support (distributed as gift funds) to be used for PhD student or postdoc support and other smaller project costs as needed.  Renewal of the funding at the same level for subsequent years is subject to review.  In addition, select projects may be under consideration for additional support under sponsored research agreements.

Proposal Requirements (One Page Maximum)

Interested faculty should submit a proposal of no more than one page, including:

1. Project Title and Investigators
   • Faculty lead and co-investigators (if any)
   • Department(s) and affiliated centers
2. Research Motivation and Objectives
   • Clear problem statement
   • Relevance to BNY-CMU AI “RRR” Research Pillars
   • Importance for mission-critical autonomous systems
3. Technical Approach
   • Core research questions
   • Methodology and anticipated contributions
   • How the work engages frontier AI systems (e.g., agentic LLMs, multi-agent coordination, adaptive systems)
4. Expected Outcomes
   • Anticipated research outputs (e.g., publications, benchmarks, open-source tools, evaluation frameworks)
   • Potential long-term impact

Optional: Brief description of prior related work (if directly relevant).

Selection Criteria

Proposals will be evaluated based on:

• Scientific originality and innovation potential
• Alignment with the Lab’s RRR mission
• Technical rigor and feasibility
• Potential for high-impact publications and long-term research leadership
• Opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration

Submission Process

Proposals should be submitted electronically by April 24, 2026 via this form. 

Selected investigators will be notified within approximately three weeks, with projects expected to begin in summer, 2026.

Through this call, the BNY–CMU AI Lab seeks to build a cohesive research community focused on defining the next generation of trustworthy autonomous AI systems for mission-critical deployment.