Blog
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AI4RA Office Hours
April 23, 2026Have questions about Vandalizer, research data, or AI? Come join us for monthly office hours! When: Fourth Tuesday of every month at 11:00am PDT Where: Zoom -
From Prompt Engineering to Context Engineering
April 21, 2026The blog post explains the shift from prompt engineering, carefully wording individual requests to get better AI responses, to context engineering, which focuses on designing the entire information environment an AI uses to produce results. -
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When Can AI Be Used in Research Administration?
March 26, 2026When Can AI Be Used in Research Administration? It Comes Down to One Question: Does It Matter How the Work Got Done? By Nate Layman AI tools are remarkably capable, and they are getting better fast. They can digest hundreds of pages of sponsor guidelines in seconds, draft polished narrative text from rough notes, and… -
From Copiers to AI: The Technology Evolution of Research Administration and Why Adoption Matters
March 10, 2026Research administration has always been a profession defined by reaction. New regulations arrive and we react. -
Digitizing the Last Mile: OCR in Research Administration
February 25, 2026University research departments receive billions of dollars in federal grants each year, but managing those grants is surprisingly old-fashioned. When a university gets a grant award, the official notice arrives as a PDF, and staff have to manually copy all the important details -
Beyond Embeddings: Why Relationships Matter in RAG
December 19, 2025Structured RAG, presented by Python creator Guido van Rossum at PyBay 2025, addresses a fundamental limitation of classic RAG: the loss of relationships between information fragments. Instead of embedding raw text into vectors, structured RAG extracts entities, relationships, and actions from conversations and stores them in queryable databases with inverted indices. -
From Clutter to Clarity: How to Build Your First Automated Workflow in Vandalizer
December 2, 2025In this guide, you’ll learn how to build your first workflow by following a real-world example — creating a Request for Applications (RFA) checklist from start to finish. -
There’s Power in Partnership: How Two Higher Ed Institutions Are Pioneering AI Innovation in RA.
November 14, 2025The research enterprise is never static, and neither are the Research Administration (RA) offices that work to turn its gears. RA offices are always responding to shifting conditions in the field, such as developing compliance requirements and growth in their institutions’ research portfolios. -
University of Idaho Pioneers AI in Research Management, Earns National Recognition
November 12, 2025Chris Nomura, U of I’s Vice President for Research and Economic Development, received the award for his role in advancing the university’s Office of Research and Economic Development and its AI and Data Science Team.