NSF  Stimulating Collaborative Advances Leveraging Expertise in the Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning   SCALE MoDL
NSF  21-561
https://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=505873&org=NSF&sel_org=NSF&from=fund

The National Science Foundation Directorates for Mathematical and Physical Sciences (MPS), Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), Engineering (ENG), and Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) will jointly sponsor new research collaborations consisting of mathematicians, statisticians, electrical engineers, and computer scientists. Research activities should be focused on explicit topics involving some of the most challenging theoretical questions in the general area of Mathematical and Scientific Foundations of Deep Learning. Each collaboration should conduct training through research involvement of recent doctoral degree recipients, graduate students, and/or undergraduate students from across this multi-disciplinary spectrum. This program complements NSF's National Artificial Intelligence Research Institutes and Harnessing the Data Revolution programs by supporting collaborative research focused on the mathematical and scientific foundations of Deep Learning through a different modality and at a different scale.

A wide range of scientific themes on theoretical foundations of deep learning may be addressed in these proposals. Likely topics include but are not limited to geometric, topological, Bayesian, or game-theoretic formulations, to analysis approaches exploiting optimal transport theory, optimization theory, approximation theory, information theory, dynamical systems, partial differential equations, or mean field theory, to application-inspired viewpoints exploring efficient training with small data sets, adversarial learning, and closing the decision-action loop, not to mention foundational work on understanding success metrics, privacy safeguards, causal inference, and algorithmic fairness.