Workshops

The event offers hands-on workshops for those who want to move from ideas to practice. These sessions are designed for AI-curious researchers and Professional Services staff — no prior AI or coding expertise required.

AI for Research 101

An introduction to effective and grounded AI use for research

A practical session for researchers with no coding or AI background. Many people formed their view of AI tools from early, frustrating experiences with ChatGPT — this workshop makes the case for revisiting that view, honestly: what's genuinely improved, what hasn't, and where the risks (including sycophancy and confirmation bias) still lie.

Starting from a simple working model of how large language models actually operate, the session builds towards something you'll leave with: a Gemini Gem, configured as a persistent, context-aware assistant for your own research topic. Rather than starting from scratch in every chat, you'll set up a Gem that already knows your background, your role, and your working style — plus a handful of prompting principles drawn from real research tasks, not abstract rules.

You'll leave with: a working Gem (or a template ready to adapt), and practical guidance for using it well.

No prior AI or coding experience required. Please bring a laptop.

AI Tools for Literature Searching

Game Changer or Unreliable Assistant?

An ever-growing number of generative AI tools now promise to speed up finding, summarising and extracting information from journal papers. They can be genuinely useful — but their outputs are also prone to hallucinated references, bias and oversimplification, so knowing where they help and where they mislead matters.

In this hands-on workshop run by colleagues from the University Library, you'll try a range of these tools for yourself and get a feel for whether and how they might fit into your own research.

Session plan

A quick tour of the main types of AI-powered tool for discovering literature
One or two worked examples of each — including Gemini, Scholar Labs, Undermind, and the AI features now built into databases such as Dimensions
Time to search using the tools yourself and tell us what worked, what didn't, and what surprised you

Please bring a laptop.

Interdisciplinary Research Collaborations

Supporting cross-domain research partnerships

Building on the Connect Create Collaborate workshop (24 June 2026), this session explores how AI tools can support interdisciplinary teamwork. Through structured networking activities, you'll test how GenAI handles collaborative writing tasks and consider its strengths and limits across different academic disciplines.

Expect practical exercises designed to help you build cross-faculty connections and take boundary-spanning ideas forward using AI.

Session details to be confirmed.

AI Agents for Research

A practical, code-along workshop introducing AI agents and how to build them for real research use cases. Attendees will work through creating an agent, equipping it with tools, and seeing how it decides which tool to use and when — moving from the underlying concepts straight into working code. By the end, participants should have a working agent of their own and a clear enough grasp of the building blocks to start adapting the approach to their own research workflows.

Requires some coding knowledge.

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