AI in the Lab workshop, roundtable, and conference presentation

A workshop on “Innovations in the Lab: Leveraging Transformations in Science”, held at the Alliance Manchester Business School on the 15^th and 16^th of September 2025, brought together the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (MIOIR) AI in the Lab team (Cornelia Lawson, Philip Shapira, Julie Jebsen, and Liangping Ding) with collaborators from Germany and Italy to critically explore how artificial intelligence is impacting scientific work and practice.  The participants engaged in extensive discussions about insights from qualitative lab interviews currently in progress with scientists and engineers in Italy, Germany, the UK, and the USA.  

One of the workshop’s highlights was an open roundtable discussion, “Reshaping Science with AI?”. The panel, moderated by Philip Shapira, featured AI professor Hujun Yin (School of Electrical & Electronic Engineering), organizational and AI researcher Mark Johnson (School of Education), and MIOIR scholars Julie Jebsen (researcher on AI in the lab) and Priscila Ferri (investigating how AI is transforming scientific practices). Stefanie Bröring (Ruhr-University Bochum), Giulio Ferrigno (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies), and Cornelia Lawson (MIOIR) served as discussants. The debate sparked thought-provoking exchanges on how AI is changing creativity, productivity, and collaboration in laboratories and considered concerns related to reproducibility, fraud, ethics, incentives, and skills.

The AI in the Lab project team was also active in the conference on Artificial Intelligence in Government and Academia, held on 11^th September 2025 at Manchester Metropolitan University. Liangping Ding presented a paper, co-authored with Philip Shapira and Cornelia Lawson, on “Assessing how modes of AI are used in science: a tool for policy analysis.” The conference was co-hosted by the Government Digital Service at the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. The paper and technical details are available here.

The “AI in the Lab” project:  Innovations in the Lab: Leveraging Transformations in Science is sponsored by a University of Manchester Faculty of Humanities Large Collaborative Grant.