A match made in hAIven?
The role of AI in fostering research collaboration & grant application
Conference
Format: Oral 30 Minutes
Topic: IT Systems and tools supporting RMA now and in the future
Abstract
Each year ca. 1200 new researchers start a career at KU Leuven as PhD student, postdoc or professor, half of them onboarding from other institutions. They become part of a community of nearly 7500 researchers, most of which they will never meet in person. A dedicated team of research support professionals is at their service to facilitate their research endeavors.
How can we, research managers and administrators, foster collaboration and direct researchers to relevant funding opportunities within in a comprehensive university that is committed to multidisciplinary & interdisciplinary collaboration and seeks ways to enhance team science?
In comes AI. Not to replace us, but to reduce intensive data wrangling & information processing time, and to intelligently suggest collaboration or funding opportunities that are not always self-evident.
KU Leuven’s Research Office, together with ICT-services, has been experimenting with different use cases and NLP techniques to assess the potential and pitfalls of using AI to support our work, mostly making use of non-commercial software.
We will present our Researcher Matching tool, which is available to all KU Leuven staff, and our Researcher-Funding Call matching tool available to RMAs, knowing full well that these tools are not fully finished or functional.
We wish to present these use cases to a larger audience of colleagues with the following intended (mutual) learning outcomes:
-Inform colleagues with a non-technical background on AI use cases that can alleviate common RMA tasks
-Share how the tools are perceived by RMA and researchers
-Present clear information on what remains to be solved
-Connect to colleagues developing similar tools and wishing to share expertise
-Show why RMA staff will not be (immediately) redundant in times of increasing AI applications