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PhD Guide

Academic Training for PhD Students

Cross-disciplinary competences

Cross-disciplinary competences are essential in modern academic studies, promoting adaptability and collaboration across diverse fields. These skills include critical thinking, communication, teamwork, and problem-solving, enabling knowledge integration from different fields and disciplines and addressing complex problems. By developing soft skills, graduates become more versatile and better prepared for dynamic professional environments. This initiative aims at embedding some of these competences into a series of five seminars, which focus on the application of new technologies, research management, bibliometrics, as well as on the future careers of students. 

The seminars are held face-to-face, a MS Teams meeting link can be provided upon request. 

Seminar for PhD Students

January – June 2026 

Speaker: Calvanese Diego, Montali Marco, Donadello Ivan, Simon Robert 
Where: Campus Bozen-Bolzano City Centre, Room C2.06 
When: 19/01/2026, from 9 a.m. to 12 a.m. 
Language: English 
Target Group: PhD students 

Content: The aim of this seminar is to provide students with a general overview of Artificial Intelligence, enabling them to address their research questions using the most appropriate Artificial Intelligence tools. The seminar will be divided into three sections.

In the first section we will provide a broad introduction to the topic, defining what Artificial Intelligence is and what is not, presenting the main types of Artificial Intelligence algorithms, and setting the stage for the two following parts.

In the section dedicated to data-driven Artificial Intelligence, we discuss the field of Machine Learning, namely algorithms that can improve their performance through data. These methods allow users to perform predictive analysis, clustering, generate new data from an input user-provided prompts, and produce counterfactual data. The section will provide a roadmap to navigate the wide range of available Machine Learning algorithms.

In the section dedicated to Artificial Intelligence ethics, we first discuss the general relationship between technology and ethics. We then seek to identify the distinctive ethical characteristics of “artificial intelligences” as outlined technically in the first part of the lecture. Finally, we introduce the concept of “trustworthiness” which plays a particularly important role in the field of AI ethics. 

Further information: phdunibz@unibz.it