SAVE THE DATE - Methodological and Practical Challenges of AI Research

This workshop addresses the methodological and practical challenges of researching AI beyond disciplinary boundaries. By bringing together scholars from diverse research backgrounds, the event fosters a collaborative environment to explore how different disciplines approach AI-related research questions. It focuses on the key decisions and lessons learned when researching AI across different faculties: Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Economics and Business, Faculty of Philosophy, Centre for Information Technology, and Campus Fryslân at the University of Groningen. Participants will gain insights into the methodologies and practicalities of AI research and have the opportunity to engage in a hands-on (Python-based) technical session. 

The event is supported by the Jantina Tammes School of Technology, Society and AI under the 2026 Grassroots Grant "Prompting with multimodal generative AI: Bridging computational methods and critical AI studies."

Programme

Workshop: “From Words to Vectors: A Workshop on Understanding Text Through Analysis”  by A. Emin Tatar  (Center for Information Technology)

In this workshop, using Python with beginner-friendly Google Colab notebooks, we will show 

• how to work with large datasets, with GPU-accelerated solutions;

• how to use text embeddings to turn text into comparable vectors and 

• how to work with those vectors to support practical analysis such as clustering, topic discovery, and trend exploration

Requirements: (Charged) laptop, Google account

Bios

Taís Fernanda Blauth is an Assistant Professor of AI and Governance at the University of Groningen, Campus Fryslân, where she teaches in the BSc Data Science & Society and directs the Tech Governance Lab (CITE). Her research focuses on AI governance, ethics, and regulation, with particular expertise in military AI and the societal impacts of emerging technologies. She completed her PhD in 2025 on the legal and ethical challenges of autonomous weapons systems. Her work explores governance pathways for responsible AI innovation, with a focus on accountability, human dignity, and public oversight in high-stakes technological domains.

Nataliia Laba is an Assistant Professor in Digital and Multimodal Communication / Humane AI at the University of Groningen. Nataliia studies visual generative AI, with a strong focus on society↔technology relationships in the context of technology adoption and use. Her research asks what visual generative AI reveals—and conceals—about people and institutional conditions under which it becomes socially acceptable. Nataliia is a former Student and Early Career Representative of the Visual Communication Studies Division of the International Communication Association and co-editor of Six Critical Lenses on AI-Generated Images (CRC Press, 2026).

Sasan Mansouri is an Associate Professor at the University of Groningen’s Faculty of Economics and Business and a Fellow of the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology & AI, where he coordinates the faculty’s AI & Digitalization theme. His research applies natural language processing and large language models to study how information shapes financial markets, along two strands: information intermediaries—analysts and business media—who acquire, process, and disseminate value-relevant insights, and the reliability and bias of AI-generated text. His work appears in Management Science, the Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, and the Journal of Business Venturing.

A. Emin Tatar is a data scientist in the Research Domain of the Center for Information Technology at the University of Groningen. His work focuses on the development and application of data-driven methodologies to complex scientific problems in medical, social, economic, and engineering domains. His research interests include statistical learning and predictive modeling, with an emphasis on translating theoretical models into practical analytical solutions.

Herman Veluwenkamp is an Assistant Professor on Normative Ethics and the Digital Society at the University of Groningen. His research focuses on conceptual engineering, meaningful human control, meaningful democratic control, and responsibility gaps, with publications in journals including Mind, Synthese, Philosophy & Technology, and Ethics and Information Technology. In the two-year “Democracy in Traffic” project, funded by the SIDN Fonds, he examines how public-sector automated systems can be deployed in democratically responsible ways. Before moving to philosophy, he studied Computer Science and worked as a software engineer and IT project manager.

Abstracts to follow in early September.

Questions? Contact Nataliia Laba at n.laba rug.nl