Next steps for the AI-Behavioural science collaboration

A project aiming to discover how to influence behavioural drivers of climate change and infectious disease by optimising Human-Artificial Intelligence for Knowledge Use will be introduced by Professor Susan Michie, Professor James Thomas and Professor Janna Hastings. We will ensure plenty of interaction both in the session and on a discussion board – we hope you can join us.

Speaker bios:

Susan Michie, FMedSci, FAcSS, FBA is Professor of Health Psychology and Director of UCL's Centre for Behaviour Change Professor Michie’s research focuses on human behaviour change in relation to health and the environment: how to understand it theoretically and apply theory and evidence to intervention and policy development, evaluation and implementation. Her research, collaborating with disciplines such as information science, environmental science, computer science and medicine, covers population, organisational and individual level interventions. She has served as an expert advisor on the UK’s Covid-19 Scientific Pandemic Insights Group on Behavioural Science (part of SAGE and the Lancet’s Covid-19 Commission. She is chair of WHO’s Behavioural Insights and Sciences Technical Advisory Group.

James Thomas , Ph.D., is Principal Investigator of the Systematic Reviews Facility for the Department of Health, England, which is a large programme of policy-relevant systematic reviews with accompanying methodological development to increase their relevance and applicability for decision-making. He co-led the Cochrane ‘Project Transform’ which is implementing novel technologies and processes (including machine learning and crowdsourcing) to improve the efficiency of systematic reviews, and is co-i on a major Collaborative Award from Wellcome, the Human Behaviour-Change Project, led by Susan Michie (UCL), which is developing technologies and methodologies to organise, synthesise and present the literature in behavioural science.

Janna Hastings, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Medical Knowledge and Decision Support, University of Zurich and University of St. Gallen, Switzerland. Janna has worked on ontology research and development for more than a decade across multiple disciplines. She develops the Mental Functioning Ontology and related projects, and until 2015 she was ontology lead and project coordinator for the ChEBI chemical ontology, during which time she also worked on related biological ontologies. She holds a PhD in Biological Sciences, an MSc in Computer Science and an MA in Philosophy.

Helpful links:

Project website

Publications

Open Science Framework

Github