How can higher education institutions obtain up-to-date research information whilst at the same time reducing the reporting burden on researchers? Agent CRIS is designed to consolidate information from websites, publication databases and authorised internal systems and process it in accordance with the ‘Core Research Data Set’ (KDSF) standard. The AI agent is designed to plan and carry out research independently. The aim is to provide reliable, standardised information for research reporting, university management and the researchers themselves, whilst also reducing the workload for researchers and university administrations. With Agent CRIS, research information is to be transformed from a duty on the part of researchers to provide it into a duty on the part of interested parties to obtain it.
Agent CRIS combines AI development, university practice and research on higher education. The University of Kassel serves as a real-world laboratory: together with the project partners, the University of Passau and the German Centre for Higher Education and Science Research (DZHW), the approach is being developed and tested in relation to specific administrative tasks. The project also investigates how key performance indicators can be better contextualised through semantic contextualisation. The accompanying research assesses the reliability of the results as well as the legal and ethical conditions of their use. The resulting tools are to be made available to other universities as open source, insofar as legally possible.
