AI

AIRON Event: AI and Research Evaluation [Jan 22, online, 16:00 GMT]

AIRON Event: AI, Research Evaluation, and REF 2029 — What We Need to Understand Now
🗓 22 January 2026 | 🕓 4pm GMT


🔗 Event link: (3) AI, Research Evaluation, and REF 2029: What We Need to Understand Now | LinkedIn

In this session, Mike Thelwall will present recent evidence on how both public models (e.g., ChatGPT) and smaller private models perform when assessing research quality. The discussion draws on REF-evaluated journal articles and also considers where AI may be applied across outputs, impact case studies, environment statements, and pre-publication peer review.

We will also explore a practical, responsible stance: LLMs can be persuasive and still wrong, but when used carefully they may provide supporting insights — for example by averaging multiple outputs and using rankings rather than absolute scores — to support, not replace, expert judgement.

This event is part one of a two-part series. We will continue the conversation in February with a follow-up panel featuring Mike Thelwall, Elizabeth Gadd, and Helen Young.

If you can’t attend live, you can still stay connected:
📩 AIRON newsletter (summary + Q&A): Newsletter sign up page
🔗 AIRON LinkedIn community: (4) AI in Research Operations Network (AIRON) | Groups | LinkedIn

ACDH Lecture: From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering [Jan 20, online, 16:45 CET]

ACDH Lecture: “From Punch Cards to Prompt Engineering: The MHDBD and the Future of Semantic Annotation with LLMs” with Katharina Zeppezauer-Wachauer & Julia Hintersteiner (both Universität Salzburg)


📅 Tuesday, January 20th, 2026
⏰ 16:45 – 18:15


The invited speakers will present the complete technological redesign of the Mittelhochdeutsche Begriffsdatenbank (hashtag#MHDBDB): After decades of development in relational and RDF-based environments, the project has moved to a TEI-first architecture designed to support LLM-driven research.

The speakers address the key reasons for this shift:
i) the need for structured, AI-readable data;
ii) the practical limits of high-complexity standoff models; and
iii) the excessive resource demands of large-scale RDF infrastructures.

In this context, Large Language Models are reshaping annotation, search, and interpretation. TEI-XML emerges as a sustainable framework for transparent, semantically robust, and interoperable Expert-in-the-Loop workflows, balancing philological rigor with AI scalability.
The talk offers a focused perspective on the evolving technical foundations of text research in the humanities.

More detailed information,

https://www.oeaw.ac.at/acdh/newsevents/event-series/acdh-lecture-121

This lecture is jointly organised in close collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities (ACDH) and the University of Vienna and is part of the University’s Digital Humanities Lecture Circuit (WS 2025).

Generating Futures: Using AI to Imagine Sustainable Places [Nov 11-14, in person, Galway]

Generating Futures: Using AI to Imagine Sustainable Places

Dates: 11th – 14th November, 2025

Location: Studio 3, O’Donoghue Centre for Drama, Theatre & Performance, University of Galway

Can Generative AI help us imagine a more sustainable world? Generating Futures brings together communities, artists, geographers and climate scientists to co-create visions of a sustainable future using the power of AI. Funded by Research Ireland as part of the Science Week 2025 programme, this series of interactive workshops are facilitated by PhD researchers based at the Centre for Creative Technologies.

Workshops:


Reimagining Nuns Island: A Speculative Design Walk

Collect Your Own Small & Local Dataset

Envisioning Future Placemaking through AI Visualisation Technologies

Brain Computer Interfaces and imagination – When Science and Art Meet

Full details and links to registration are available via: https://universityofgalway.ie/creative-tech/collaboration/science-week-2025/

Reference Extraction at the Intersection of AI Research and the Digital Humanities: Validation, Interoperability and Collaboration [Nov 4, hybrid]

Reference Extraction at the Intersection of AI Research and the Digital Humanities: Validation, Interoperability and Collaboration

This informal meeting is meant mainly to foster collaboration and knowledge exchange between researchers and practitioners working at the intersection of data extraction, artificial intelligence, and the digital humanities. In the workshop, we continue to address the challenge of extracting heterogeneous references from texts, particularly from historical documents and humanities or legal scholarship. This second workshop focuses on three key themes emerging from the 2023 discussions:

  1. Validation: How can we evaluate and benchmark the performance of different reference extraction tools and approaches, particularly with large language models?
  2. Interoperability: How can we ensure that different tools, datasets, and workflows can work together effectively through shared data models and formats?
  3. Collaboration: How can researchers, developers, and institutions work together to advance the field of reference extraction?

The program is available online at: https://mpilhlt.github.io/reference-extraction/workshop-2025/programme/

The event will take place in-person and online. Register at https://plan.events.mpg.de/e/refextract25 

A link for online attendance will be sent to registered participants before the event. Also, even if you cannot attend, but want to be informed about updates, materials being made available, etc. you can notify us about this at the registration link.

Programme

Tuesday 04 November 2025

Onboarding

09:00-09:15 Arrival/Registration

09:15-09:45 Christian Boulanger/Andreas Wagner (mpilhlt): Welcome and Upshot from RefExtract2023, State of the Discussion

09:45-10:00 Coffee Break

Research presentations

10:00-12:30

  1. Hiba Arnaout (TU Darmstadt): In-depth Research Impact Summarization through Fine-Grained Temporal Citation Analysis
  2. Yurui Zhu/Matteo Romanello (Odoma): Benchmarking Large Language Models on Reference Extraction and Parsing in the Social Sciences and Humanities
  3. Sofía Aguilar Valdez (Saarland University): How Scientific Ideas Evolve
  4. Open Discussion and Ad-Hoc Presentation of Research

12:30-13:30 Lunch

Datasets, Infrastructure and Interoperability

13:30-15:30

  1. Angelo Di Iorio/Matteo Guenci/Marta Soricetti*/Silvio Peroni/Lorenzo Paolini*/Ivan Heibi (University of Bologna): Citation Extractor and Classifier: Pipeline and Datasets (*presenting)
  2. Tamara Heck/Christoph Schindler/Verena Weimer/Philipp Mayr/Ahsan Shahid (DIPF/GESIS): Open Citation Data for Educational Research
  3. Christian Boulanger, Andreas Wagner (mpilhlt): Datasets in the Legal Theory Knowledge Graph Project
  4. Interoperability Roundtable: Open Discussion on Data Models and Data Formats

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

Tools, Workflows and Pipelines

16:00-17:30

  1. Raphael Schlattmann/Malte Vogl (mpigea)/Aleksandra Kaye (TU Berlin/mpigea): LLM-Based Knowledge Graph Extraction Pipeline
  2. Luca Foppiano (ScienciaLAB): Training the Grobid Reference Extraction Models
  3. Christian Boulanger/Andreas Wagner (mpilhlt): Annotation Tools for Machine Learning: PDF-TEI Editor (for LLamore & Grobid), Prodigy, TEI-Publisher

17:30-18:30 Takeaways, Way Forward, Closing