What kinds of topics are you looking for?

We present these potential topics of exploration as examples, but this is not meant to be a comprehensive list of all potential research directions. Successful proposals can pertain to topics that are not included on this list. 

Potential areas of interest include:

• How expressions of distress, delusion, or other mental health-related language vary across cultures and languages, and how these differences affect detection or interpretation by AI systems

• Perspectives from individuals with lived experience on what feels safe, supportive, or harmful when interacting with AI-powered chatbots

• How mental healthcare providers currently use AI tools, including what is effective, what falls short, and where safety risks emerge

• The potential of AI systems to promote healthy, pro-social behaviors and reduce harm

• The robustness of existing AI model safeguards to vernacular, slang, and under-represented linguistic patterns—particularly in low-resource languages

• How AI systems should adjust tone, style, and framing when responding to youth and adolescents to ensure that guidance feels age-appropriate, respectful, and accessible, with deliverables such as evaluation rubrics, style guidelines, or annotated examples of effective vs. ineffective phrasing across age groups

• How stigma associated with mental illness may surface in language model recommendations or interaction styles

• How AI systems interpret or respond to visual indicators related to body dysmorphia or eating disorders, including the creation of ethically collected, annotated multimodal datasets and evaluation tasks that capture common real-world patterns of distress

• How AI systems can provide compassionate, sensitive support to individuals experiencing grief — helping them process loss, maintain connections, and access coping resources — along with deliverables such as exemplar response patterns, tone/style guidelines, or evaluation rubrics for assessing supportive grief-related interactions

What kinds of outputs are you expecting from funded projects?

We’re sharing illustrative examples of deliverables below to help spark proposals, but these are by no means exhaustive:

• Research papers that aim to gather evidence around the above areas of interest, or related matters

• Taxonomies of model behavior in sensitive contexts that could be further improved

• Culturally or linguistically diverse datasets

• Prototype interaction flows showing contextually appropriate conversational patterns

Who can I contact for any questions about this grant?