SDSC National Call for Collaborative Data Science Infrastructure Projects

Pre-proposal submission deadline: 27 October, 2025

Invitation to submit full proposals: 19 December, 2025

Full proposal submission deadline: 27 February, 2026

Final decision on full proposals: 19 June, 2026‍

Start of collaborative projects: September-December 2026

The Swiss Data Science Center (SDSC) is a National Research Infrastructure expanding its mandate to advance data science and artificial intelligence (AI) across research, industry, and the public sector in Switzerland

The SDSC is launching its second National Calls for collaborative projects set to begin in 2026. The call procedure enables the SDSC to identify and engage in impactful projects and collaborations and is a vital instrument to allocate our resources in a fair and transparent manner.

The 2025 Call for Collaborative Data Science Infrastructure Projects welcomes community-driven projects to create, extend, or prototype data science infrastructures in line with the FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) principles. Selected projects will benefit from in-kind contributions from SDSC engineers, supporting either:

• deep technological exploration and prototyping for initiatives in the early discovery and definition phase, where needs are clearly articulated but solutions require focused exploration before moving to full-scale infrastructure development;
• Minimum Viable Product (MVP) development for projects meeting specific readiness and impact criteria, ready to progress into building operational, reusable infrastructure.

Eligibility

The main applicant must be affiliated with a Swiss federal or cantonal administration, or with one of the recognised Swiss higher education research centers. Researchers affiliated to USI are eligible.

Applicants must be in a position to carry out projects under their own responsibility and to lead project staff both technically or scientifically and as personnel. Applicants must be able to show that:

• they have the relevant qualifications to contribute to the proposed project;
• they are employed at least for the duration of the project at the institution they are affiliated with or have been given assurance of such employment in writing;
• the necessary resources are at their disposal to contribute appropriately to the proposed project.

Types of projects and duration

All projects supported under this call involve close collaboration with SDSC engineers and follow a design-thinking approach. Depending on the project stage of development and readiness, two types of support are available:

• exploration and prototyping projects (3–6 months): corresponds to the Experiment phase of the project lifecycle. Focused on ideation and validation, this phase explores needs and potential solutions, resulting in one or more prototypes or proof-of-concepts. It is intended for initiatives where the need is well articulated but institutional or technical conditions are not yet sufficient for operational deployment;
• MVP development projects (up to 24 months): corresponds to the Build & Test phase of the deep tech research lifecycle. For projects meeting specific readiness and impact criteria, prototyping is extended into the development and testing of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — operational, reusable infrastructure components ready for adoption, integration, and scaling

This distinction ensures that both early-stage initiatives and more mature projects can benefit from SDSC’s expertise in ways suited to their level of readiness.

Project Stage Assessment Form

Resources granted

SDSC offers to contribute in-kind personnel and computational resources needed for the work contributed by the SDSC. Please note that the SDSC cannot fund third parties and does not grant any resources in cash:

• the resources in personnel allocated in-kind by the SDSC for a project are determined based on the needs of the project. They are typically of the order of 0.5 FTE per year (to 1 FTE for the Research and Infrastructure calls) for the duration of the project, exceptions are possible;
• if relevant, SDSC will provide in-kind computational resources needed for the work of its staff and for the related data analysis and data science work carried out by the project partners for the duration of the project, including temporary storage and CPU/GPU resources. An estimate of the amount of resources should be proposed and motivated in the proposal.

Collaborative Research Data Science projects are projects of up to two years.

Additional info on resources granted and duration is available on the General documentation (attached).

Further details and relevant documentation
SDSC Call for Collaborative Data Science Infrastructure website

Contact
Igor Sarman, Research service