The "AI Sandpit" RCC co-hosted on Monday, 14 September 2026, as part of UQ's Research and Innovation Week, was a roaring success.
The interactive showcase explored AI’s quirks and blind spots through hands-on demonstrations and playful challenges. From inconsistent outputs to hidden assumptions, various interactive 'stations' revealed how AI can lead research astray and what can be done to steer AI in the right direction for research and scientific integrity.
RCC hosted the event alongside UQ’s Office of the Pro-Vice Chancellor (Research Infrastructure).
RCC Director Jake Carroll, as well as RCC’s Sarah Walters, Oliver Cairncross, Dr Edan Scriven, Jonathan Hadwen, Aaron McDowall, Matthew Russell, Dr David Green, and Josh Riantoputra (who has a dual UQ and IBM role as part of the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation), contributed their expertise to the showcase.
RCC’s team developed three demonstrations and five interactive ‘stations’ for the showcase.
The "Prompt Matters" demonstration covered how small changes in prompts can lead to big changes in output.
The "Hallucination" demonstration showed how two different AI platforms fed the same photograph will come up with completely different explanations of what that photograph is, and how they can sometimes be totally wrong, or close but not perfect.
RCC Principal IT Web Applications Developer Jonathan Hadwen’s demonstration involved challenging frontier AI models to a game of chess by LCZero, a specialist chess neural network. Jonathan said: “The frontier models usually start suggesting illegal moves within the first 12 moves and are always beaten by the specialist model, even though LCZero’s network is at least 37,000 times smaller. Sometimes a narrow focus is better.”
At Senior Principal Scientific Frameworks Officer Oliver Cairncross’s "I'm an AI expert, ask me anything" table, he answered attendees’ AI questions. “He was incredibly popular,” said RCC Research Systems Projects and Delivery Manager Sarah Walters, the AI Sandpit co-organiser alongside PVC (RI) Project Manager Jasmine Roberts.
At an interactive station called “Two Truths and AI, attendees had to guess which Humanities and Science research paper abstracts were fake. Sarah said: “It ended up being exactly 50% correct for the Humanities, and only 1 out of 9 people guessed correctly for the Sciences!”
During the showcase, some Large Language Models (LLMs) ran on the IBM Fusion platform, which is part of the IBM@UQ Centre of Excellence and Innovation, and all AI models ran on hardware physically located in UQ's tenancy in the Polaris Data Centre in Springfield, Queensland.
A panel discussion and Q&A followed the showcase featuring UQ speakers Jake Carroll, Professor of Computer Science Shazia Sadiq, Professor of Artificial Intelligence Tim Miller, and Dr Peter Worthy, a lecturer in Human-Centred Computing.
The panelists shared how they work with AI and the current UQ initiatives that can help mitigate risks while accelerating impactful research in an ever-changing landscape.
Overall, PVC (RI) Professor Paul Bonnington said it was “a great event.”
Jake Carroll said he had received a wave of positive feedback following the AI Sandpit. The feedback, he said, suggested the event “wasn’t just good – it was exceptionally good.”
