Request for proposal - EA Animal Welfare Fund

By KarolinaSarek🔸 @ 2020-05-28T03:02 (+35)

This post was written by Kieran Greig, Lewis Bollard, Alexandria Beck, and Karolina Sarek.

The EA Animal Welfare Fund aims to effectively improve the well-being of nonhuman animals.

This Request for proposal (RFP) aims to solicit applications for the July 2020 funding round that its fund managers feel particularly excited about. Listed below are areas and subareas of particular interest to the fund managers. Proposals that don’t address these will also be considered but, all else equal, are less likely to receive funding. Proposals need not address all areas or subareas below and can focus on just one or more.

Proposals must be submitted on or before June 15, 2020. Funding decisions are planned for approximately one month later.

Please review some further information here prior to submitting a proposal here.


John_Maxwell @ 2020-05-29T08:24 (+10)

Here's a project idea that someone might want to take on.

It's been argued (response) that bivalves have much reduced capacity for suffering compared to other commonly eaten animals. And according to this recent NY times article, "Mollusks like clams, oysters and scallops are also great low-carbon choices."

What could get people to substitute with bivalves? Lowering the price should help. A quick search on Amazon suggests that canned mussel (one of the bivalves highest in Omega-3s according to this chart) is 2-3x as expensive per ounce as canned salmon.

How could the price be reduced? On this US government website, you can see a picture of a guy culling and grading oysters by hand. Google has a case study on its website of a Japanese cucumber farm which used deep learning to sort cucumbers. Could similar technology be developed for bivalves? As a bonus, you could develop AI skills along the way, and potentially make a decent amount of money. It might be best to partner with/be hired by existing efforts in the bivalve automation space... here is one I found on Google.