How can autonomous AI agents support rigorous, reproducible scientific research? Join PhD students and professional researchers for an online seminar led by Renan Maestri, exploring how agentic AI differs from chat-based tools and how it can support literature workflows, coding, and research tasks in R. Through examples from computational biology and the life sciences, you’ll learn to compare local and cloud-based deployments, explore the open-source OpenCode ecosystem, understand token costs, and assess when AI-assisted automation is methodologically appropriate. Build the skills to use these tools critically while keeping your workflows transparent, reproducible, and auditable. The seminar is available via Zoom, with recordings and materials accessible for 30 days, a post-seminar Q&A forum, and an Instats certificate of completion. #BibliometricResearch #Bioinformatics #Biology #Biostatistics #Botany #ClimateChange #ComputationalBiology #Ecology #EvolutionaryBiology #Genetics #Genomics #LifeSciences #PlantEcology #InformationScience #SoftwareEngineering #DataScience #ComputerScience #OpenCode #RStudio #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Generative AI can transform research—but knowing when to trust it, which tool to choose, and when not to use it isn’t always obvious. Join Professor Peter Gruber for an online seminar that takes the mystery out of large language models and AI agents, building practical intuition about how they work, where they fall short, and how to use them effectively across academic tasks. Explore topics from tokens, embeddings, and next-token prediction to transformers, hallucinations, model selection, prompting, privacy, and agentic workflows. No programming or advanced mathematics knowledge is required. Peter brings technical and statistical expertise, extensive research experience, and a track record of AI seminars attended by more than 5,000 researchers. This seminar is part of Instats’ four-part course, “Using and Managing AI Agents Successfully”; save 10% when you enroll in all four seminars: https://instats.org/course/a-bit-of-ai-%E2%80%93-using-and-managing-agents-2. Attend live online or watch the recordings and access the materials for 30 days after the seminar. A certificate of completion is provided. #AcademicLiteracy #AI disciplines #DataScience #Statistics #StatisticsEducation #CognitiveScience #ComputerScience #InformationScience #SoftwareEngineering #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Working with Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) can unlock valuable insights for health research and policy—but producing reliable findings requires a clear understanding of how these complex data are collected, coded, structured, and managed. Join our online seminar for PhD students and professional researchers to explore HES data quality, common inconsistencies and biases, strengths and limitations, secure and confidential analysis, and the process of applying for data access. Lectures and hands-on exercises using simulated data in R or Stata will help you build practical skills you can adapt to your own projects; no prerequisites are required for the lecture sessions. Attend live via Zoom or learn asynchronously, with recordings and materials available for 30 days, plus access to an expert-moderated Q&A forum and an Instats certificate of completion. #Epidemiology #Healthcare #PublicHealth #Biostatistics #DataAnalytics #DataScience #administrativedata #InformationScience #Statistics #Ethics #Medicine #R #Stata #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Already using AI tools in your research but ready to move beyond one-off prompts? Join business professor Martin Qiu for a practical, three-hour online seminar on using OpenAI Codex to build structured, repeatable, and auditable research workflows. Through live demonstrations and worked examples, you’ll learn to organize project files, plan tasks for AI agents, work with local research materials, and critically evaluate AI-generated outputs—all while maintaining privacy, provenance, and human oversight. Leave with practical resources you can adapt to your own projects, including a reusable folder structure, work-order template, AGENTS.md template, and research-integrity checklist. Previously offered on June 5, 2026, the seminar received a 5/5 participant rating. Attend live via Zoom or access the recording and materials for 30 days. An official certificate of completion is provided. #ArtificialIntelligence #DataAnalytics #SoftwareEngineering #InformationScience #ComputerScience #Education #DataScience #Codex #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can we predict connections that involve groups—not just pairs? Join Professor Moses Boudourides of Northwestern University for a four-day, non-coding online workshop on hyperlink prediction in hypergraphs. Designed for PhD students, academics, and professional researchers, the workshop explores how hypergraphs can reveal collective dynamics in fields such as social science, health, bioinformatics, finance, and transportation. Discover methods for hypergraph reconstruction, hidden hyperedge prediction, and temporal forecasting, alongside approaches including similarity-based heuristics, embeddings, Hypergraph Neural Networks, and spectral methods. Participants will gain a practical conceptual toolkit for applying these ideas in their own research. Seminars are delivered via Zoom, with recordings and materials available for 30 days, plus access to an expert-monitored Q&A forum and an Instats certificate of completion. #Engineering #ComputerScience #Business #SocialSciences #DigitalHumanities #HealthSciences #InformationScience #Statistics #Mathematics #DataScience #Bioinformatics #Python #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Join Dr. Seraphine Maerz, Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, for a practical, research-focused online seminar on fine-tuning large language models for text analysis. Designed for PhD students and professional researchers across disciplines, this hands-on workshop explores when to fine-tune and when to use alternatives such as prompt engineering, preparing and evaluating data, applying LoRA, and building reproducible workflows. Guided Jupyter/Colab notebooks make each step approachable, and no prior Python or R experience is required—just a willingness to work hands-on with code. Attend live on Zoom or learn asynchronously: seminar recordings and materials are available for 30 days, with an expert-monitored Q&A forum and a certificate of completion included. disciplines #HealthSciences #PoliticalScience #SocialSciences #InformationScience #Statistics #ComputerScience #DataScience #PublicHealth #Linguistics #GoogleColab #Jupyter #Python #R #RStudio #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How does scientific knowledge change as it moves from research papers into public, visual, digital, archival, and AI-mediated contexts? Join Diana Popa for an advanced seminar for PhD students and professional researchers that rethinks science communication as meaning-making—not simply the transfer of information. Through a case study of seaweed research, participants will explore how framing, narrative, images, authority, and audience shape the representation of evidence and uncertainty, and gain practical tools to analyse communication materials and design thoughtful pathways for sharing their own research. The seminar is relevant to researchers preparing publications, grant applications, public engagement, policy materials, and interdisciplinary outputs. Livestreamed via Zoom, with recordings and materials available for 30 days, a monitored Q&A forum, and an Instats certificate of completion. #ScienceCommunication #Education #Linguistics #InformationScience #Communication #Sociology #PhilosophyofScience #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Want to use AI for research without sending sensitive data to the cloud—or worrying about usage limits, recurring costs, and reproducibility? In this hands-on online seminar, PhD students and professional researchers will learn to select, install, and use capable open-weight language models on their own computer. With Professor Peter Gruber, you’ll explore model choice, quantization, hardware requirements, and practical tools, then connect a local model to Python and agentic workflows. Leave with a working local LLM setup and a clear understanding of what these models can—and can’t—do for your research. The seminar is part of the four-course series Using and Managing AI Agents Successfully, with a 10% discount when you enroll in all four seminars: https://instats.org/course/a-bit-of-ai-%E2%80%93-using-and-managing-agents-2 disciplines #DataScience #Econometrics #Statistics #SoftwareEngineering #InformationScience #ComputerScience #LMStudio #Ollama #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How do generative AI tools really work—and how can you tell which tasks they’re suited for? In this practical online seminar, “Next Token, Please,” PhD students and researchers will explore the foundations, capabilities, and limitations of large language models and AI agents, building the intuition to choose the right tool for academic tasks—or decide when not to use AI. No programming or advanced mathematics required. Led by Professor Peter Gruber, whose AI seminars have been attended by more than 5,000 researchers, the seminar is part of Instats’ four-part course “Using and Managing AI Agents Successfully.” Enroll in all four seminars together and receive 10% off: https://instats.org/course/a-bit-of-ai-%E2%80%93-using-and-managing-agents-2 #AcademicLiteracy #AI disciplines #DataScience #Statistics #StatisticsEducation #CognitiveScience #ComputerScience #InformationScience #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can AI agents support rigorous, reproducible research without replacing scholarly judgment? Join Professor Leonid Chindelevitch of Imperial College London’s School of Public Health for a practical online seminar on designing and assembling AI research agents for academic work. Explore how to identify tasks for automation, adapt existing tools or build custom workflows, and verify outputs to reduce errors and avoid pitfalls such as hallucinated citations. Through guided demonstrations, you’ll develop practical skills for applying agentic AI to literature, data preparation, documentation, and other research workflows while keeping transparency and human oversight at the center. The seminar is delivered via Zoom, with recordings and materials available for 30 days, plus a monitored Q&A forum and an Instats certificate of completion. #ResearchMethods #ResearchWorkflows #Education #InformationScience #DataScience #ComputerScience #SoftwareEngineering #Antigravity #ClaudeCode #Codex #Grok #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Ready to bring AI-assisted data analysis into your research—with confidence and reproducibility? Join Professor Peter Gruber, who holds PhDs in physics and economics, for a practical three-day online Python workshop designed for PhD students, academics, and professionals with no prior programming experience. Learn to inspect, understand, run, and improve code generated by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, and use Python for tasks including data cleaning, statistics, regression, and time series analysis. With hands-on exercises using tools such as Google Colab and GitHub Copilot, you’ll build skills to validate AI-generated analyses and develop reproducible research workflows. The seminar includes daily take-home challenges, recordings and materials available for 30 days, an instructor-monitored online forum, and an Instats certificate of completion. #Psychology #Sociology #Economics #Geography #SocialWork #Criminology #PoliticalScience #Education #Statistics #DataScience #SoftwareEngineering #ComputerScience #Mathematics #InformationScience #Python #ChatGPT #Gemini #Claude #GoogleColab #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can AI support clinical reasoning without sacrificing rigor, transparency, or patient safety? Join our online seminar for PhD students and professional researchers to explore how laboratory results, EHR data, and large language models can be combined to generate clinically plausible diagnostic hypotheses and patient-facing explanations. Through practical work with causal graphs, counterfactual evaluation, temporal data, reproducible pipelines, and clinically meaningful metrics, you’ll gain strategies for assessing model performance, robustness, and explanation fidelity—and for shaping findings into publishable research with translational impact. Attend live via Zoom or learn asynchronously: seminar recordings and materials, plus access to an expert-moderated Q&A forum, are available for 30 days after the seminar. Participants receive an official Instats certificate of completion. #ArtificialIntelligence #Biomedicine #CausalInference #ComputerScience #DataAnalytics #DataScience #HealthSciences #ClinicalorLaboratoryScience #Medicine #Ethics #InformationScience #BiomedicalEngineering #Statistics #Bioinformatics #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Turn messy research data into a reliable, reproducible workflow. In this online seminar, Dr. Flavio Lombardo guides PhD students, postdocs, and professional researchers through importing and cleaning real-world CSV data with dplyr and tidyr, then creating clear, publication-ready visualisations with ggplot2. You’ll also see how large language models can help extract structured data from text—and learn how to validate their output and keep human oversight in the process. Leave with practical skills, hands-on exercises and worked solutions to revisit, plus guidance you can apply to your own research. Attend live via Zoom or catch up with the recording and materials, available for 30 days after the seminar. An official Instats certificate of completion is provided. #ComputationalBiology #InformationScience #SoftwareEngineering #Statistics #DataScience #ComputerScience #ggplot2 #R #tidyverse #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Join this half-day online seminar for PhD students and professional researchers exploring how to find and document clinical trial information—including unpublished results and ongoing research. Learn practical approaches to searching ClinicalTrials.gov, the WHO ICTRP, Cochrane CENTRAL, clinical study reports, preprints, health technology assessment sources, and regulatory agency resources such as Health Canada, the EMA, and the FDA. Led by Carol and Julie, who each bring 30 years of experience in information retrieval for evidence synthesis, the seminar is valuable for researchers, clinicians, librarians, and information specialists. Attend live via Zoom or revisit the recordings and materials for 30 days after the seminar. Sign up alongside “Search Filters for Evidence Synthesis” to save 10% on both. #Healthcare #HealthSciences #InformationScience #Medicine #Multidisciplinary #Nursing #PharmaceuticalScience #Biostatistics #Epidemiology #PublicHealth #ClinicalorLaboratoryScience #Pharmacology #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can you use large language models to produce reliable, reproducible insights from specialized text? Join Dr. Seraphine Maerz, Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, for a practical, one-day online seminar on fine-tuning LLMs for research. Designed for PhD students and professional researchers across disciplines, the workshop combines clear conceptual guidance with hands-on Jupyter/Colab notebooks—no prior Python or R experience required. Explore when to fine-tune and when to use prompt engineering, prepare and evaluate data responsibly, fine-tune BERT with LoRA, and build reproducible workflows for text classification and analysis. Attend live via Zoom or learn asynchronously: recordings and materials are available for 30 days, with an expert-monitored Q&A forum and a certificate of completion. disciplines #HealthSciences #PoliticalScience #SocialSciences #InformationScience #Statistics #ComputerScience #DataScience #Ethics #GoogleColab #Jupyter #Python #R #RStudio #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can AI support qualitative research without replacing the researcher’s critical judgment? Join Kenneth Benoit (SMU) and Seraphine Maerz (University of Melbourne) for an intensive, hands-on seminar exploring AI-powered qualitative analysis in R. Learn to use quallmer and ellmer to analyze and annotate text, images, audio, video, PDFs, and tabular data; connect to leading proprietary and open-source models; design reliable prompts; validate AI outputs; and build reproducible workflows. No prior R or machine-learning experience is required, and all code and guided materials are provided. The seminar also addresses privacy, ethical data handling, model choices, and how to integrate AI thoughtfully into existing qualitative methods. Attend live online or learn asynchronously with 30-day access to recordings and materials, plus a seminar Q&A forum. An Instats certificate of completion is provided. #QualitativeResearch #AI #ResearchMethods #RStats #ComputationalSocialScience disciplines #HealthSciences #PoliticalScience #SocialSciences #Education #ComputerScience #DataScience #SocialTheory #InformationScience #Statistics #R #RStudio #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can generative AI support rigorous academic research—not just produce convincing text? Join Evagoras Xydas, expert educator and CEO of IREROBOT, for a practical online seminar designed for PhD students and professional researchers. Learn to build a private, evidence-grounded research assistant using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), Python, and locally run language models through Ollama. Working with academic literature, PDFs, qualitative data, and other research documents, you’ll explore how to retrieve relevant evidence, generate source-supported answers, and critically evaluate outputs for hallucinations, citation errors, and unsupported claims. With a focus on privacy, transparency, reproducibility, and human validation, this seminar connects practical AI skills with the standards of defensible scholarship. Attend live via Zoom or revisit the recordings and materials for 30 days after the seminar, with an expert-monitored Q&A forum available throughout that period. An official Instats certificate of completion is included. Build your AI research skills while keeping evidence and research integrity at the centre. #AppliedResearch #ArtificialIntelligence #ComputerScience #DataScience #InformationScience #Education #HuggingFace #Jupyter #Ollama #pypdf #Python #Qwen2.5 #scikit-learn #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

Looking to bring a spatial dimension to your research? Join Dr Nick Bearman of University College London and Geospatial Training Solutions for a free online introduction to geographic information systems (GIS), designed for PhD students, academics, and professional researchers. Discover how GIS can help you visualize spatial data, analyze geographic patterns, and explore questions across disciplines—from ecology to urban studies. The seminar covers essential GIS concepts, spatial data sources, common software platforms, and practical strategies for integrating GIS into your research. Attend live via Zoom or revisit the recording and materials for 30 days after the seminar, with access to an expert-monitored Q&A forum during that period. An Instats certificate of completion is included. Ready to build on the foundations? Participants can also access an automatic 10% discount on Dr Bearman’s follow-on courses, QGIS: A Full Course 2.0 and GIS in R: A Full Course 2.0. Explore the seminar and register through Instats! #Geography #InformationSystems #SpatialEcology #Ecology #EarthScience #Statistics #DataScience #InformationScience #ComputerScience #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can you ensure your online survey produces credible, reliable evidence? Join Adam Berinsky of MIT’s Political Experiments Research Lab for an advanced online seminar designed for PhD students and professional researchers. Explore how respondent inattentiveness, non-probability sampling, and question-context effects can undermine findings—and learn evidence-based strategies to address them. Through practical examples, you’ll strengthen your skills in attention checks, online panel evaluation, question and scale design, pretesting, and reproducible quality-control procedures. Build a methodological toolkit to support your dissertation, grant proposals, and journal submissions, with an emphasis on transparent reporting and defensible research decisions. Attend live via Zoom or revisit recordings and materials for 30 days, with access to an expert-monitored Q&A forum and an Instats certificate of completion. Familiarity with basic survey design is required. Taking both Introduction to Survey Design and this advanced seminar? Enrol in the two-seminar course for a 10% discount: https://instats.org/course/survey-design1 #Marketing #OnlineSurvey #PoliticalScience #SocialPsychology #SocialSciences #Sociology #SurveyDesign #DataScience #Statistics #SocialTheory #InformationScience #Communication #Education #CognitiveScience #Psychology #Qualtrics #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats

How can agentic AI support your research—and how can you verify its work? Join Professor Michael Zyphur for an online Instats seminar designed for PhD students and researchers across disciplines. Moving beyond chatbots and basic automation, the seminar explores how AI agents can support literature reviews, data analysis, writing, grant development, and multi-step research workflows while keeping human judgment, accountability, and methodological integrity at the centre. You’ll learn practical approaches to defining tasks, checking evidence, testing outputs, and establishing human approval points, and leave with reusable tools: an AI Method Card, Responsible AI Use Protocol, Verification Scorecard, and Agentic Research Team Blueprint. Attend live via Zoom or revisit recordings and materials for 30 days, with expert-monitored Q&A support during that period. The seminar also introduces the four-part Agentic AI for Academic Research course, with a 10% discount when purchased together. Explore the course: https://instats.org/course/agentic-ai-for-academic-research1 #HealthSciences #Humanities #LifeSciences #NaturalSciences #SocialSciences #PhilosophyofScience #Education #ComputerScience #InformationScience #Ethics #DataScience #ChatGPT #Claude #ClaudeCode #Codex #Gemini #Copilot #Research #ResearchTraining #Instats