On Tuesday evening, I submit my grant for InnovateUK's July Round of Smart Grants through a grant writing partner service.

Idea: The research literature uncovers a bunch of new techniques for understanding animals, but these academics aren't going for the animals that we care most about.

Product: Give dog owners a fun and engaging way to deepen their relationship with man's best friend.

Take one-minute vertical video of your dog and analyse for behavioural cues. Build your streak, share your moments, and look back on memories and anniversaries with your 3D scanned in-app dog avatar (Additional outfits sold separately).

Tech: Apply contemporary machine learning approaches from the research literature to build an app to listen to and understand dogs.

Team: I'm a Machine Learning Engineer with 4 years experience. My co-founder is a senior application developer. We have someone with common sense to handle operations. We've lived together in AI Safety adjacent grouphouses.

Execution: TBD. Grant funding is for £495k for 12 months of industrial research including Community Dataset Creation, ML development, App development, Pre-User Testing.

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Additional Info for context.

Grant writing partner tells me the success rate for applications without them is 5-10% and with them is 55-60%. 70% of the previous round's winners used this service.

https://apply-for-innovation-funding.service.gov.uk/competition/1982/overview/e5d935d6-0690-4f1d-b442-4fb868be8384