DSI Meet Up: AI as a Research Assistant: How Do You Work With It? special edition for Natural Science Researchers

AI as a Research Assistant: How Do You Work With It?

New tools such as GPT-5 and Google Scholar Labs go well beyond traditional literature search. They can support hypothesis generation, reveal unexpected connections, and even draft parts of a manuscript. Useful—yet also challenging.

In this interactive session, we will explore with a small group of researchers (natural sciences / engineering):

• Are we already using these tools in our own research workflows?
• Where do they offer time savings or genuinely new ideas?
• And where do tensions arise: reliability, reproducibility, authorship?

We will work with short, recognisable scenarios from everyday research practice (literature review, data analysis, writing) and discuss: “What would you do here—how, and why?”
This is not an introductory AI course or an ethics lecture, but a collegial conversation about how you want to (continue to) work with AI-supported research tools.

This session is part of a study on how academics integrate AI into their work practices. Outcomes will be anonymised; participants will receive a brief summary of the key findings afterwards.