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Workshop: AI Assistants Can Increase the Quality of Your Research: A Foundations Workshop

 

Details

Date: Tue, 15 + Thu, 17 December 2026, 09:00–12:30 h
Location: online via Zoom
Target group: Postdocs from all research fields of the UA Ruhr Universities (max. 25 participants)
Trainer: PD Dr. Daniel Mertens
Registration deadline: 01 December 2026
Contact for organizational Questions: event@rs.ruhr-uni-bochum.de


Description

AI assistants can become a genuine partner for research work — sharpening how you plan, verify, and produce your best output — once you understand how they actually function and how to work with them deliberately. This workshop builds exactly that foundation: the concepts and interaction patterns that make AI assistants a genuine contributor to research quality.

In this workshop:

  • Engines vs. wrappers — what's actually happening underneath the interface you use, and why that shapes what you can trust
  • Production vs. retrieval — how to read AI output for what it actually is, and calibrate scrutiny accordingly
  • Context engineering — how what you give an assistant determines the quality of what you get back
  • The 3-step interaction ladder: moving from a single request, to letting the assistant ask you clarifying questions, to using it as a synthetic expert or devil's advocate — three deliberately different ways to work with the same assistant

Participants leave with a working mental model of how these systems function, and three concrete interaction modes they can apply immediately — the foundation for using AI assistants as a genuine partner in every later stage of their work.

 

Trainer

PD Dr. Daniel Mertens is Biochemist, Lecturer and group leader at the German Cancer ResearchCenter (DKFZ) and at the University of Ulm. He shares his knowledge and experiences since several years as professional trainer as is an expert for responsible use of AI in research.

* In order to provide you with a comfortable registration process, we use registration forms of our service partner eveeno®. Please note the information on the allocation of places on the program overview page.