Kaggle is offering Kaggle Competitions Research Grants to Academic/Research Institutions and Non-Profit organizations to host competitions which further their machine learning research efforts. The goal of this program is to bring more novel and diverse machine learning use cases to challenge the Kaggle Community, which in turn advances the problems hosted by these organizations. If you would otherwise lack the budget to fund a competition and qualify based on the below terms, we invite you to apply!
What does this program offer?
In each application round, we will be selecting up to 3 competitions to be featured on Kaggle’s main Competitions page, with the following sponsorship:
- Reduced or waived service fees
- Funding of the competition’s prize pool
What are the eligibility criteria?
To be eligible for a research grant, your organization must:
- Be an Academic/Research Institution or a Non-Profit organization.
- Have a competition topic and dataset to be vetted as a fit for Kaggle.
- Have the full dataset ready for review, not containing already public labels (minimally the test set must be composed of data that has not already been released).
- Have the evaluation metric available in the Kaggle library or that you can create with Python Metrics.
- Have a data licensing agreement that allows for open/any use, or minimally for academic/research use.
- Allow the winners of your competition to publish their solutions under an open-source license.
- Have some flexibility in your launch timeline.
What are the selection criteria?
When reviewing applications, Kaggle will consider the following factors:
- The benefit to the Kaggle community.
- The impact on the broader machine learning industry.
- The dissemination of machine learning knowledge.
- The novelty of the topic.
- The complexity of the competition.
- The licensing of the data and winning model.
- The flexibility of the launch timeline.
- The level of support required.
- The financial need.
How to apply?
To apply for a research grant, please follow these steps:
- Fill out the Kaggle Competitions Research Grants Application.
- Create a DRAFT Community Competition and provide the URL in the application for review (DO NOT LAUNCH YOUR COMPETITION YET).
- You may refer to the “how-to” setup guide to help you get started. Please feel free to raise any questions/ discussions in the Competition Hosting Forum and take a look at the FAQs for additional guidance.
- Please note any additional feature requests if your competition requires more capabilities than Community Competitions currently offer (e.g. code only, simulations, sync re-run, two stage, etc.).
Application Timeline
| Application Round | Application Open | Application Due Date | Notification Date |
| Q3 2023 | August 3, 2023 | September 4, 2023 | October 3, 2023 |
| Q4 2023 | October 2, 2023 | November 10, 2023 | December 21, 2023 |
| Q1 2024 | January 2, 2024 | February 12, 2023 | March 26, 2024 |
| Q2 2024 | April 1, 2024 | May 10, 2024 | June 25, 2024 |
Note that if your application is submitted after the specified application due date, your application will be considered for the next application round.
Once your application is reviewed, we will reach out with selection results and next steps.
Contact
For any questions, please reach out to researchgrants@kaggle.com. We look forward to seeing your application!