Slides
Wednesday 4 March, 3:15-5pm
(Week 6, Belfast campus)
Dr Usman Hadi, Lecturer in Engineering – School of Engineering
Teaching in Engineering
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Wednesday 22 April, 3:15-5pm
(Week 11, Belfast campus)
Bayan Natsheh, PhD Researcher – School of Communication and Media
Enhancing AI Assessment Literacy for Palestinian EFL teachers
Previous talks
Tuesday 2 September 2025, 10:30 – 12:00
BD-02-033 (Belfast campus)
Using AI responsibly – Ethics and Resources
Dr Julie McCarroll, Head of Research Governance and Integrity
AI and Ethical Research
Tadhg Hickey, Head of AI and Digital Ethics Policy, AICC
Responsible AI in industry and connecting research opportunities
Description: This talk will explore the practical challenges and opportunities of embedding responsible AI principles into industry contexts, drawing on real case examples from our work at the AICC. The session will discuss how ethical frameworks translate into operational decisions, the tensions between innovation and governance, and where industry needs academic research to step in. The session will close with reflections on building meaningful collaborations between researchers and practitioners to ensure AI is both cutting-edge and socially responsible.
Mary Rose Holman, Campus Subject Manager
Eimear Evans, Open Research Manager
Navigating GenAI Ethics: The Library’s Role in Responsible Teaching and Research
Description: The integration of GenAI into teaching and research practices creates both opportunities and ethical challenges for academic institutions. This talk will explore how academic libraries are uniquely positioned to provide guidance for responsible GenAI adoption while empowering libraries to champion ethical scholarship and Open Research practices.
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Tuesday 14 October 2025, 10:30 – 12:00
Collab Lab (Coleraine campus)
Dr Eoin McElroy, Senior Lecturer in Psychology – School of Psychology
Using AI for the Pooling and Harmonization of Survey Data
Description:
Pooling data from different survey studies can enhance statistical power, enabling more precise estimates of trends and associations. This approach also facilitates cross-national and cross-cohort comparisons, revealing how demographic, policy, and environmental differences influence outcomes over time. However, harmonizing variables across surveys often presents challenges, including differences in data collection methods and instruments.
This workshop will discuss these challenges and provide guidance on how developments in AI, specifically Natural language processing (NLP), can be used to facilitate the harmonization of questionnaire data.
- Outline common challenges when harmonizing data
- Demonstrate different approaches to data harmonization
- Provide a demonstration of Harmony (https://harmonydata.ac.uk/), an open-source NLP tool for harmonizing questionnaire data
Target audience: Researchers from across the social and health science, particularly those who routinely use questionnaire data in their research. Basic understanding of data management, and multivariate analyses will be useful. A basic knowledge of R code would be useful, but not essential.
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Tuesday 2 December 2025, 10:30 – 12:00
MU207 (Derry~Londonderry campus)
Dr Brian McGowan, Lecturer in Higher Education Practice & AI CoP co-lead – Centre For Prof Practice Enhancement
Using AI to Build Better Assessment Rubrics with SOLO Taxonomy
Description:
Assessment and feedback has been characterised as the key feature that defines the student experience in university. Designing assessment rubrics is a time-intensive task that demands clarity, fairness, and differentiation.
This session explores the use of generative artificial intelligence, specifically Copilot, to assist and support the rubric development process, with a focus on alignment to the SOLO Taxonomy. Integrating AI into rubric design helps address key challenges such as consistency, objectivity, differentiation between grade boundaries and managing workload, while maintaining academic oversight and alignment with institutional policies on responsible AI use. While AI is not a replacement for academic judgment, it is a powerful tool for supporting efficient and pedagogically sound assessment design.
Workshop objectives:
Because of this session you will be more confident about:
- Using generative AI tools like Copilot to design assessment rubrics aligned with the SOLO Taxonomy
- Evaluating the clarity, fairness, and differentiation of AI-assisted rubric designs
- Applying responsible AI principles to maintain academic integrity and institutional alignment in assessment design
Target audience: Colleagues who have a role in assessment and feedback.
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Wednesday 21 January 26, 3:15-5pm
(Week 0, Belfast campus)
Dr Juliana Gerard, Lecturer in Linguistics – School of Communication and Media
Automatic Speech Recognition for text analysis, and AI troubleshooting
Description:
This talk will focus on harnessing AI to tackle a challenge across research fields that work with largescale audio recordings: transcribing these recordings to text format, before being able to analyse the text content. Advances in speech to text transcription can offer quick solutions to this problem; however, many commercially available options require that participant data be shared with a third party for transcription. This requirement poses ethical complications when participants have not consented in advance.
This talk will explore the alternative of local transcription models, which do not require data sharing. We apply this option for a project looking at Newcomer pupils’ English language acquisition between 2013-2020, which uses Batchalign – a programme for transcribing and analysing children’s speech.
To complement the talk, we will look at how AI can be used for troubleshooting in technical settings, like the Batchalign environment. As time constraints prevent demonstrating this in Batchalign, we will look at the case of deploying and troubleshooting Microsoft flows – focusing on automated event invites.
Workshop objectives:
- Greater understanding of participant data storage and processing – advantages of local models
- Introduction to text analysis and analyses for second language acquisition
- Strategies for troubleshooting technical issues using Microsoft Co-pilot (or chatbot of choice)
- Basics of Microsoft Flows
Target audience: Colleagues interested in participant data, text analysis, and automation with MS Flows.