On-Device Multimodal Perception call for proposals: Fall 2026

The On-Device Multimodal Perception call for proposals is a Fall 2026 round of the Amazon Research Awards. It comes from Amazon's Devices and Services organisation, which names Echo, Alexa+, Fire TV, Fire tablets, Kindle, Ring, Blink, and eero. The call is about the on device intelligence that turns what a small device measures into something useful.

The page describes compact, battery powered devices that sense through small apertures, modest optics, and low power silicon, inside a fixed power and thermal budget. It says the sensor output is dim, noisy, and geometrically imperfect, and that the capture may be incomplete. Research topics include learned compression versus semantic tokenization, and learned multimodal sensor fusion for object tracking from raw inertial, visual, and ranging streams. The page welcomes theoretical advances, new ideas, and practical applications.

Selected principal investigators may receive unrestricted funds, no more than $80,000 USD on average, and AWS Promotional Credits, no more than $40,000 USD on average. They also get training, including AWS tutorials and hands on sessions with Amazon scientists and engineers. Awards are one time unrestricted gifts. The budget should list expected costs in USD and should not include administrative overhead. The awards panel sets the final amount. Decision letters go out in February 2027.

The principal investigator must be a full time faculty member at an accredited academic institution, or a permanent researcher at a non governmental organisation with recognised legal status equivalent to 501(c)(3) status in the United States. They must be at or above the age of majority. Each principal investigator may submit only one proposal to the Amazon Research Awards in this call period. Amazon employees cannot receive an award. The rules also bar recent Amazon staff, their immediate family or household, paid government employees other than at an accredited academic institution, and people under US export controls or sanctions. The program is void in Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, and the Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine.

The submission period is 1 October to 4 November 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time. Proposals should follow the ARA proposal template and are encouraged to stay within 4 pages, not counting appendices. The call also asks which research topic you target, how the method differs from existing work, the constraints it meets, how you will evaluate it, what will be done in the one year award, which open source code or datasets you will contribute, and which AWS tools you will use. Submit through the call page.