Green light for 15 projects under the global call for interdisciplinary research on "Mobility – Global Medicine and Health Research". The following interview surrounds first experiences with a funding offer that has unintentionally become topical in the wake of the corona pandemic.

The Volkswagen Foundation has approved a total of around 12 million euros for eight interdisciplinary and international research networks in the social and the engineering sciences that share an integrative focus on the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and society. The aim of this funding initiative is to strengthen interdisciplinary and trans-national research on socially responsible approaches to the further development of AI systems.

Science, too, has its share of failures and mistakes. But nobody likes to talk about it in public. The Journal of Unsolved Questions takes a completely different approach. It publishes zero results.

Quality assurance is and remains absolutely indispensable for science. However, the limitations of peer review are becoming increasingly evident. New approaches are therefore urgently needed – such as the partially randomized selection of projects by lot.

In our interview, Dr. Dagmar Simon and Dr. Martina Röbbecke from Evaconsult report on initial results from their accompanying research project on the partially randomized procedure applied in the "Experiment!" funding initiative.

Missing data, incomplete minutes, unclear research designs: many pre-clinical studies in biomedicine are not quite 100% robust. A team led by Charité researcher Prof. Dr. Ulrich Dirnagl is committed to improving research quality – so they developed PREMIER.