How is AI changing the way research is done, checked and understood? The FORRT AI in Metascience Online Conference takes three days over that question, with 37 talks and workshops from people who are studying it or building with it. Registration is now open, and everyone is welcome.
When28–30 Sept 2026 · 09:30–18:00 CEST (UTC+2)
WhereOnline, Google Meet
CostFree
FormatSingle track, 37 talks & workshops. Follow it all or dip in.
Here are the sessions and the talks in each, in the order they run. Click any talk to read its abstract. All times are CEST (UTC+2), and everything runs in a single track, so nothing clashes. A time marked TBC is still awaiting the speaker’s confirmation and may shift by a few minutes.
Monday 28 SeptemberAI in the research pipeline
Morning
09:30Welcome and framingThe organisers
09:40When AI writes the literature
The problem as it already shows up in the correction record, the pressure producing it, and two routes to a better literature.
From what frontier models can extract, through a head-to-head test of the tools built on them, to the safeguards that would make an AI-assisted review checkable.
Afternoon
13:15Evaluating science, and its evaluators
What it takes to make a paper checkable in the first place, what human review actually does, what a computational novelty signal might add, and a tool that checks a paper against what its authors said they would do.
15:05Conditions for legitimate adoption
What researchers do with these tools, what open infrastructure and open data would require, who gains or loses when the tools arrive, the rules of use that follow, and what it would take to make research outputs readable by machines in the first place.
17:10Closing provocation
A challenge to the premise that complex problems are the kind of thing better tools solve.
Tuesday 29 SeptemberReplications and reproductions
Morning
09:30Symposium: Can AI Help Us Understand How Findings Move from Animal Studies to Human Studies?
Four talks, mostly by early-career researchers, on tracing the biomedical evidence trail across publications, trial registries and regulatory documents. Chaired by Benjamin Ineichen.
11:15Reproducing the record
Replication and reproduction as work actually done, with agents in the loop and with the paperwork that makes a result reusable, followed out to whether anyone downstream notices.
Afternoon
13:20Getting our hands dirty: experimenting with agentic reproductions and robustness checks
The practical counterpart to the talks either side of it. Take one published analysis, ask a coding agent to reproduce it and to check how robust it is, and see where it works and where it fails quietly. No prior experience needed.
14:40Symposium: predicting replicability
Three talks and a panel on forecasting which findings will hold, and what such forecasts are for. Convened by Andrew Tyner.
16:05Machines that build and test the replication record
First the benchmarks that measure what these agents can actually do, then the two databases being built on that basis with humans kept in the loop, and last the question the day has been circling: can an agent run the checks at human quality?
Wednesday 30 SeptemberWorkshops, and analyst variability
Morning
Afternoon
15:00Does the finding survive another analyst?
The other way a result fails to hold. The study is not repeated badly; a defensible alternative analysis simply lands somewhere else. And the alternatives increasingly consult the same model.
Everything runs on Google Meet. We will email joining details to everyone who has registered in the week before the conference, so use an email address you check.
Live captions are on in every session. If anything else would help you take part, tell us on the registration form, and we will do what we can.
Where speakers opt in, their talks are published afterwards on the
FORRT YouTube channel.
Code of conduct
Everyone taking part, whether presenting or watching, follows the
FORRT code of conduct.
During the conference, raise a concern with the organising committee — message a session chair or the organiser, or email
l.wallrich@bbk.ac.uk. We will act on it the same day. Afterwards, or if you would rather not come to us, report it to the FORRT ethics committee, either by contacting any of its members or through the
anonymous reporting form. FORRT’s
confidential advisor is there if you would like to talk something through first.
Questions
Email the organiser, Lukas Wallrich, at
l.wallrich@bbk.ac.uk, or message him on the FORRT Slack.
