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NeurIPS Foundation Announces 2026 Bridging the Future Grants Program Recipients

The Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation is excited to announce the recipients of the NeurIPS 2026 Bridging the Future Grants Program, created to support innovative activities that broaden participation in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Open to learners at every stage, from grade school students taking their first steps in computational thinking to senior faculty developing new pedagogical approaches, the six recipients of this year’s program were selected from 134 applications submitted from organizations and individuals around the world. 

The winning projects were selected for their global relevance, innovation, and novel approach that has not been widely implemented in AI/ML education and outreach. 

The NeurIPS 2026 Bridging the Future Grants Recipients

  • Aderonke Sakpere

AI and Data Science for Her: Training the Next Generation of High School Girls in Nigeria

This program will train 300 Nigerian high school girls across six geopolitical zones of the country in the fundamentals of AI and data science. Grounded in published research on how teenage girls engage with technical subjects, the curriculum is deliberately girl-centered, pairing students with female mentors already working in AI, and connecting technical concepts to capstone projects addressing real challenges in healthcare, agriculture, and education. AI clubs formed in each participating school will keep the learning going long after the program’s formal end.

  • Aleksei Komissarov 

The Voice-Native Classroom: Multilingual AI Co-Teachers for Global ML Education

Most AI tutoring tools ask students to type, which is a barrier for learners working in a second language. This project builds a voice-native AI co-teacher that converses with students in their own language, and is available at any time of the day. Already piloted in a live university course since September 2025, the approach will now scale to reach more than 1,000 students across 50+ countries through Neapolis University in Cyprus and DataTalks.Club, a Berlin-based online community of 80,000 learners – with no tuition and no language barrier standing between students and rigorous ML education.

  • Sermin Kalafat 

DTCH (Digital Turcology and Cultural Heritage) 

DTCH Digital Turcologist Bootcamp Historical Turkic languages, including Ottoman Turkish, Old Uighur, and Chagatai, are vastly underrepresented in the AI world. Researchers in this field have lacked the shared benchmarks and documented datasets that make AI results comparable and reproducible. This 12-week online bootcamp addresses that directly, training 18–24 researchers, librarians, and heritage professionals to apply AI to historical manuscripts responsibly – building evidence packs, benchmark kits, and reproducible notebooks that anyone can verify. All materials will be published openly so communities working with other under-resourced historical languages can run the same program themselves.

  • Tushar Shinde 

The 100x Challenge: Compression-First Research Pipeline for Bandwidth-Constrained Regions

Rather than treating limited computing infrastructure as an obstacle, this program treats it as a design constraint worth building around. Researchers across Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Ethiopia will learn to compress AI models to run on basic smartphones and low-cost hardware, then apply those skills in small research teams tackling problems in medical imaging, agriculture, and efficient ML theory, with mentorship from Stanford, Oxford, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University guiding teams toward publication-ready work.

  • Piera Riccio 

FATE-AI: Futures of Agriculture, Technology, and Ecology in Artificial Intelligence

Set in a rural farming community in the Matese National Park region in Southern Italy, where students have studied in temporary classrooms since a 2013 earthquake, this project pairs a 30-hour AI course grounded in agricultural applications with a one-month artist residency. The result is an interdisciplinary approach that teaches technical skills alongside critical, ethical thinking about technology’s role in farming communities, leaving behind both new capabilities and a lasting piece of public art.

  • Jon Saraydar

Wikair (Student-Led Nonprofit), a Global, Youth-Led, Interdisciplinary AI Education Program

Wikair trains high school students to teach AI workshops to other students – connecting the subject to psychology, art, ethics, media, and business along the way, not just code. With 10-20 free workshops planned across at least five U.S. states and a fully open-access curriculum library released to the public, this peer-educator model shows how far a lean, volunteer-powered budget can reach.

Each of these projects reflects something we hoped to see when we opened this program: a willingness to meet learners where they are, rather than asking them to clear barriers built for someone else’s circumstances. We look forward to following their progress over the coming year and sharing updates as these programs reach their first cohorts of students and researchers.

If you have questions about the NeurIPS Bridging the Future Grants Program, or are interested in future funding cycles, please reach out to the NeurIPS Foundation at: bridging-the-future@neurips.cc.

We are grateful to everyone who took the time to share their vision with us, and look forward to continuing to invest in creative, impactful initiatives that broaden participation in AI and machine learning.

NeurIPS Foundation

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