AI Assistants Can Increase the Quality of Your Research: A Foundations Workshop
- Research Academy Ruhr
- Leadership, Supervision & Management Competencies
- Führungs-, Betreuungs- & Managementkompetenzen
- For Postdocs
- Für Postdocs
- Workshop
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.
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
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