Seminar 24 September

 Dr Conal Monaghan  is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Medicine and Psychology, where he leads the Precision Lab and is the convenor of the Master of Professional Psychology program (MPP). His work operates at the intersection of clinical psychology, psychometrics, and artificial intelligence: focusing on dimensional models of personality and psychopathology, open-source idiographic measurement, and AI-integrated research methods. He is also currently the Chief Investigator on an AI project funded by the Australian Federal Government. He is a registered clinical psychologist and published over 40 articles in psychological measurement.

 

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming commonplace in our daily lives and in academic research. However, the swift rise of AI has been accompanied by a wave of myths, exaggerated fears, and misconceptions, ranging from confusion about how to integrate these tools into academic workflows to sci-fi narratives of AI sentience and autonomy.

 

This workshop aims to cut through the hype and demystify what AI, and specifically Large Language Models (LLMs), actually are. Strip away the science fiction, and at their core, LLMs are essentially highly sophisticated text-prediction and auto-complete systems. By understanding these underlying mechanisms, researchers can demystify how these tools operate and evaluate them rationally.

 

The brief workshop will then walk through several practical use cases across the research lifecycle. With a focus on real-world application, and provide a guide for the next steps to that you can confidently apply AI to your own research projects.