* AI Mini Barcamp: Your Questions, Tools and Practices (GGG) online

Trainer: The interactive online sessions are facilitated by Dr. Christian Steinau. Christian Steinau enjoys formats in which dialogue leads to concrete action. His academic home is LMU Munich, where he earned his doctorate on the topic of judgment: a skill that is becoming increasingly important in today’s work with AI. After all, the better AI systems become at producing texts, analyses, and ideas, the more important it becomes to consider how we evaluate, contextualize, and responsibly utilize their outputs. As the director of a Transfer Lab, he worked at the intersection of research, society, and application. In 2020, he founded the Cultural Policy Lab, which he has been leading since 2025 as a research firm specializing in the cultural and creative industries. His initiatives combine a curiosity about new technologies with scientific rigor, peer learning, and a clear focus on integrity and practical value.

Internal experts: In addition to the trainer, different experts from the Göttingen Campus will be available for questions and exchange.

Participants are warmly invited to contribute their own questions, experiences, tools, workflows and critical perspectives. The aim is to learn from one another, build networks across disciplines, and develop practical, reflective and future-oriented ways of working with AI in doctoral research.

This AI Session is an open lab for everything that is currently on your mind when it comes to AI and doctoral research.

• What are you already trying out?
• What feels helpful, confusing, risky or promising?
• Which tools are you using — or deliberately not using?
• Where do you feel you need orientation, feedback or simply a place to think things through with others?

You are warmly invited to come with your own questions, half-formed ideas, practical examples, doubts or experiments. You do not need to have a finished workflow or a clear position on AI. The point is precisely to create a space where doctoral researchers can speak openly, compare experiences across disciplines and reflect together on how AI is already changing research practices.

Possible topics may include literature work, writing, data analysis, translation, productivity, teaching, research design, agentic AI, reflection on bias or ethical questions, discipline-specific use cases or advanced AI workflows. Participants who already experiment with AI tools, build their own workflows or work with agentic systems are especially welcome to share their experiences — not as a showcase, but as a contribution to collective learning.

Why join? Because many doctoral researchers are currently facing similar questions, but often deal with them alone. This session offers a friendly, interdisciplinary and non-judgemental space to exchange experiences, ask practical questions, receive feedback and discover how others are navigating the same transformation.

The goal is to move from uncertainty to shared orientation and from big questions about the future of research to concrete, usable insights for one’s own doctoral practice.

The session will take the form of a mini barcamp. This means that participants themselves help shape the agenda. At the beginning, we will collect questions, topics, tools, workflows and concerns from the group. Based on these interests, we will form smaller discussion or practice groups and explore selected topics in more depth.

All AI Sessions of GGG are not designed as a conventional training courses. Instead, they create a regular forum for exchange, reflection, peer-learning and empowerment. Together, participants will discuss concrete AI tools and workflows, critically assess their opportunities and limitations, and relate current developments to their own doctoral projects and disciplinary contexts.