Save the date for the Second DiTraRe Symposium: 6-7 April 2027!
Save the date for our second Interdisciplinary Symposium on Digitalisation of Research, which will take place in Karlsruhe at KIT Engler Bunte Institute from 6 to 7 April 2027! We plan two days full of interactive interdisciplinary sessions together with a call for papers to enable participants to present their research in the form of oral presentations or posters. More information will be available soon!
April Colloquium: AI Training for Scientific Research: A Copyright Perspective with Pascal Sierek
Join us for the next Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Digitalisation of Research on 2 April at 11:00 on Zoom! This time our guest will be Pascal Sierek (Max Planck Institute for Comparative and International Private Law, Hamburg) who will give a talk on "AI Training for Scientific Research: A Copyright Perspective".
- Introduction: AI training in scientific research and its reliance on copyrighted material
- Text and data mining exceptions for AI training (§ 44b UrhG, § 60d UrhG)
- Legal boundaries and unresolved questions (in particular whether AI training qualifies as text and data mining in general)
- Outlook
Upcoming: DiTraRe @ STS Netherlands Conference at Uni Twente in April!
🎉 We are happy to announce that two DiTraRe abstracts were accepted to the STS Conference Netherlands! The event takes place 15-17 April at the University of Twente.
➡️ Challenges of Coordinating an Interdisciplinary Consortium: Leibniz Science Campus DiTraRe. To be presented by Anna Jacyszyn, co-authored by Harald Sack
➡️ Towards a FAIR-compliant Harmonised AI-based Automatic Metadata for Climate Research. To be presented by Felix Bach, co-authored by Sven Hertling, Tobias Kerzenmacher, Sabine Barthlott, Christian Bonatto Minella, Anna Jacyszyn
👥 Ania and Felix are very much looking forward to attending the conference and continuing our intense efforts on interdisciplinary networking! We are also hoping to deepen our collaboration with Mieke Boon.
Upcoming: May Colloquium with Sören Auer
We cordially invite you to our May Interdisciplinary Colloquium on Digitalisation of Research! We meet via Zoom on May 7 at 11:00 and our special guest will be Sören Auer who will give a talk on From Knowledge Graphs to AI Assistants: Transforming Scholarly Communication with ORKG and TIB AIssistant.
- The vision and architecture of ORKG for structuring and comparing research contributions.
- ORKG ASK as an interface for querying scholarly knowledge graphs using AI.
- The TIB AIssistant as a companion for discovery, summarization, and knowledge synthesis.
- Opportunities and challenges in integrating knowledge graphs and AI for open, interoperable science.
DiTraRe Symposium report
The meeting report on the DiTraRe Symposium has been published in the new March 2026 issue of TATuP. 📖 The event, held on the 2nd and 3rd December 2025, at the Center for Arts and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, focused on the development of digital technologies such as generative AI and their impact on science in terms of scientific knowledge, scientific quality assurance, and scientific infrastructure.
It was an enriching event for interdisciplinary exchange from the perspective of the DiTraRe project’s dimensions:
- Exploration and knowledge organization 🗃️
- Legal and ethical challenges ⚖️
- Tools and processes ⚙️
- Reflection and resonance 🗣️
Recent: February Colloquium with Thorsten Strufe
"No anonymisation technique can make data truly anonymous."
This statement sums up our latest interdisciplinary colloquium very well. Our speaker, Prof. Dr. Thorsten Strufe, a computer scientist and expert in data privacy and IT security, vividly demonstrated how common anonymisation techniques work and why they often fail to achieve anonymity. He also explained why this does not spell the end for research involving personal data and how the GDPR can support researchers in this context.
Check out the video recording on our YouTube channel and presentation on Zenodo.
Recent: March Colloquium with Lina Franken
The march-episode of our interdisciplinary colloquium is in the books 📚
Check out the recording on Youtube from the DiTraRe Interdisciplinary Colloquium “Testing, Exploring, Infrastructuring. Critical-Reflexive Perspectives on Digital Practices within Social Sciences and the Humanities” by Prof. Lina Franken (University of Vechta), hosted by Linda Nierling (Institute for Technology Assessment and Systems Analysis (ITAS))!
Learn more about:
- The Definition of Digital Practices,
- Digital Practices of Researches with the three Areas:
*Testing: methodological changes
*Exploring: changes regarding the source material analysed
*Infrastructuring: handling and design of digital databases
- And the three Critical-Reflexive Perspectives:
*Testing, exploring, infrastructuring in and for digital practices
*Relevance of generative AI as and in digital practices
*Focus on human-technology relations in reflection
Recent: "Technology Assessment for Artificial Intelligence in the Digital Transformation" presentation
As part of the KASTEL Winter Colloquium on 25th February 2026, Dr. Linda Nierling (ITAS) held a presentation on "Technology Assessment for Artificial Intelligence in the Digital Transformation".
In her presentation, she first introduced the role of technology assessment (TA) in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), emphasizing that AI developments are embedded in socio-technical contexts. Secondly, she presented examples of TA projects on AI (digital disinformation/deepfakes, societal debates on AI, digital transformation of research (DiTraRe)). Thirdly, she discussed digitalization as a transformative process and the potential for interdisciplinary collaborations.
Recent: presentation RDM in sports science
At the 45th annual conference of the Association of Sports Science Libraries, Katja Keller inspired the audience with the diversity of RDM in sports science. She presented the projects at the IfSS, including the DiTraRe use case, and encouraged attendees to keep RDM simple and start small!
6th International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge is coming to Bari, Italy, in October!
🎉 6th Sci-K is coming!!! Great news to share: while we are finalising the paper based on our last Sci-K in Nara, Japan, the next edition was approved and will take place on October 25/26 (the specific day to be decided later) in Bari, Italy! The 6th International Workshop on Scientific Knowledge (Sci-K) will be co-located with the 25th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC). 🥳
👉 The call for papers will be out soon, stay tuned!
Recent: Successful AI 4 Scholarly Communication bridge @ AAAI in Singapore!
🎊 🇸🇬 In January the very successful second edition of the AI4SC bridge @ 40th Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence took place in Singapore! During the event we managed to bring together a community of researchers interested in recent advancements in the area of neurosymbolic AI and its effects on science and communication.
🗣️ We broadly discussed the multiple ways in which AI is influencing research, the need for human-AI collaboration, AI as an author of both experiments and papers, the possible future outcomes and the way researchers will be impacted. Even though the undergoing transformation is mostly unpredictable, we remain hopeful and definitely stay connected. 😊
🥇 In between the sessions we also played a short game 🪨📜✂️ and learned a bit about each other in the ice-breaker panel.
Many thanks to:
💐 Our very active participants for enhancing the event with your questions, comments and ideas.
💐 The keynote speaker, Mark Gahegan, for a truly inspiring talk!
💐 Authors and speakers for interesting contributions!
💐 Organising committee for all your hard work and time devoted to organising the bridge!
💐 Program committee for your time and providing valuable reviews within a very short time window!
🔜 Check out the AI4SC uploads on Zenodo (work in progress).