Harmony News
How are research funders reacting to the AI governance vacuum? 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.
MethodsCon in Manchester We have attended MethodsCon: Futures in Manchester, run by the National Centre for Research Methods on 11 and 12 September 2024 to present Harmony, the NLP and AI tool we have been developing for researchers in social science, funded by Wellcome and the Economic and Social Research Council. The events took place at The Edwardian Manchester. Methods Showcase – 11th September The first event was a workshop on 11 September:
BMC Psychiatry has published our paper validating Harmony on real-world data We are pleased to announce the publication of a paper validating Harmony on real-life data: Using natural language processing to facilitate the harmonisation of mental health questionnaires: a validation study using real-world data, authored by Eoin McElroy, Thomas Wood, Raymond Bond, Maurice Mulvenna, Mark Shevlin, George B. Ploubidis, Mauricio Scopel Hoffmann and Bettina Moltrecht, and published in BMC Psychiatry.
Sending data from another website to Harmony using Javascript We have exposed functionality for external websites to integrate with Harmony and add an “import to Harmony” button, either generated in Javascript or in Python. Create an Instrument object with at least an instrument_name and questions property in JSON - the questions must have a question_no and question_text properties eg: { "instrument_name": "Smoking behaviour", "questions": [ { "question_no": "1", "question_text": "Do you currently smoke or have you ever smoked?
Harmony at PyData London - 86th Meetup Update: you can download the slides from the presentation here Topic: NLP and generative models for psychology research Thomas Wood will present our work on Harmony, harmonydata.ac.uk, which is a free online tool that uses generative AI and LLMs to help psychologists analyse datasets. It uses Python, Pandas and HuggingFace Sentence Transformers to find similarities between questionnaires. Psychologists and social scientists often have to match items in different questionnaires, such as “I often feel anxious” and “Feeling nervous, anxious or afraid”.
Data Harmonisation in Education: Overview The term ‘harmonisation’ has often been used in different contexts – for example, to describe similar phenomena, such as collaboration, coherence, alignment, integration, partnership, etc. However, we might argue that these concepts might do nothing more than indicate the extent and scale of integration among different entities when it comes to regional cooperation. Now, the underlying degree of interaction between all the players involved can run a lot deeper and tighter when we transition from collaboration, partnership, and cooperation to integration, community, harmonisation, and interdependence.