It’s widely known that thousands of research papers are being published every week, and it’s therefore impossible for anyone to stay on top of the deluge of research that’s coming out. Indeed, this is one of the core use cases for IBM’s Watson, as they aim to do all of that legwork for you and digest the key nuggets to help you with your work.
Most of those use cases have been deployed in medical fields however, where being on top of the latest thinking is especially important.
So it’s interesting to see the recent launch of the Human Behaviour Change Project, which attempts to do a similar thing for research on behavior change. The venture, which is a collaboration between UCL, University of Aberdeen, University of Cambridge and IBM, aims to provide technical support to help humans make sense of a domain that is nothing if not complicated.
Finding the needle in the haystack
The team are developing a free, online system that will allow people to scour evidence on behavior change from around the world. To begin with, they’re codifying what is known about behavior change interventions into a database. Key aspects of published studies are then extracted to train an AI system that will be used to hunt for vital aspects of studies in future.
The algorithms will be designed to search, predict, recommend and explain features of behavior change interventions, with the team confident that as they codify more and more papers, the system will be able to deliver more accurate and reliable results.
“Over time, as the algorithms improve, we will test how accurate the system is at automatically extracting this information,” they say.
It’s hoped that the system will be free of many of the biases that harm human decision making, so not only will the system be more efficient, it will also be more effective at digesting the data contained in the research literature.
The final stage of the project will see an online interface created to allow the tool to be used to query the research literature in an easy and accessible way.
“If all goes to plan, we will launch the system in 2020,” the say. “The system will hopefully lead to policymakers, psychologists, GPs and other specialists using the most effective methods to help people change their behaviour and lead healthier lives.”
