A recent article by Sense about Science, a leading independent charity that promotes the public interest in sound science and evidence, highlights the growing need for responsible AI governance in research.
The article, titled Research funders tackle AI governance vacuum with pragmatic guidance, discusses the alarming gap between the rapid development and adoption of AI tools, and the lack of clear frameworks for their safe and ethical use. This is particularly concerning in healthcare, where AI applications are increasingly used without established regulations.
Sense about Science recognises the importance of responsible AI development. Harmony tackles a key challenge in mental health research, namely harmonising data from different studies.
Dr. Bettina Moltrecht from UCL, who worked on Harmony and is now leading the project under the current UKRI grant, points out that “researchers need the awareness and knowledge captured in the framework for tools being developed not to become obsolete or impractical for others to pick up”.
The Harmony team has taken steps to ensure the long term viability and sustainability of the tool. You can read more in our sustainability assessment which we completed with the Software Sustainability Institute.
We have recently validated Harmony against real mental health data and our validation has been published in BMC Psychiatry as: McElroy, E., Wood, T.A., Bond, R., Mulvenna M., Shevlin M., Ploubidis G., Scopel Hoffmann M., Moltrecht B., Using natural language processing to facilitate the harmonisation of mental health questionnaires: a validation study using real-world data. BMC Psychiatry 24, 530 (2024). DOI: 10.1186/s12888-024-05954-2
We have regularly presented the Harmony project at events such as AI|DL London, MethodsCon Futures in Manchester, Hackathon in UCL, Melbourne Children’s LifeCourse Initiative seminar series, and AI Camp.
For users who have been using Harmony in their research, we have created an example scripts repository here https://github.com/harmonydata/harmony_examples This contains example R notebooks and Jupyter notebooks. You can upload your own example script if you have something to share with the research community. Example problems that users have been solving included: R examples Walkthrough R notebook in R Studio: Walkthrough R notebook in Google Colab: R Markdown to Check for Correspondence between Differently Worded Versions of the Same Scale Item View on Github - credit to Deanna Varley R Script to Check for Matches between Items from Different Scales View on Github - credit to Deanna Varley Python examples Walkthrough Python notebook Example script to create a crosswalk table on real survey data Example script to strip prefixes from questions Documentation View the PDF documentation of the R package on CRAN
Upcoming Tech Talk: GenAI and LLMs night at Google London on 10 December 2024 We’re pleased to announce that the AI tool Harmony will be showcased at the upcoming GenAI and LLMs night at Google London on 10th December organised by AI Camp. Topic: Harmony, Open source AI tool for psychology research Speakers: Thomas Wood (Fast Data Science), Bettina Moltrecht (UCL) Date: 10th December 2024 Register RSVP to join the AI and LLMs night at the Google Campus on 10 December 2024 See other Harmony events 8 October 2024: Harmony: a free online tool using LLMs for research in psychology and social sciences at AI|DL London 11 and 12 September 2024: Harmony at MethodsCon Futures in Manchester 2 July 2024: Harmony: NLP and generative models for psychology research at Pydata London 3 June 2024: Harmony Hackathon at UCL 5 May 2024: Harmony: A global platform for harmonisation, translation and cooperation in mental health at Melbourne Children’s LifeCourse Initiative seminar series.
