Data Scientists from the Hartree Centre North East Hub worked alongside Pathways Open to create an artificial intelligence search tool built on publicly available data.

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Challenge

The conventional academic research framework can segregate academics from industry researchers hindering the translation of findings. Strategic academic-industry partnerships are pivotal for continuous and effective innovation for the benefit of wider society as well as for commercial opportunity. More often than not, even within the highest-performing university labs, potentially breakthrough research is left only to be published, meaning there is no clear route for it to be used or even found by companies who could turn it into something ground-breaking.

Matching Academics to industry partners is currently a labour-intensive and inefficient process. Pathways Open would like to revolutionise this process through the better use and analysis of publicly available data, and application of modern AI tools and techniques.

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Approach

The Hartree Centre North East Hub team worked with Pathways Open to explore the problem, identify data science and engineering solutions and create a proof of concept. We first created a search tool to explore and collate publicly available data sources which had been identified by Pathways Open. We then automatically combined this with other publicly available secondary resources. Finally, we used Large Language Models to extract key points of information and generate the metrics and data points for the basis for a report that outlined potential academics for an industry partnership.

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Benefits

The project allowed Pathways Open to understand the possibilities of utilising AI to speed up the matching process. The proof of concept, which was designed around the existing workflows, provides automation where possible but also allows human exploration of the results and outputs. With this experience and codebase, Pathways can build upon the platform to include more data sources and further explore the power of LLMs in the extraction of information and generation of insights while enabling high-quality academic-industry partnerships

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“The Hartree Centre North East Hub team were able to understand our vision and develop a proof-of-concept solution that begin to tackle the complex challenge of matching academics with industry partners”

- Sandeep Sharda, Pathways Open

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“The expertise in AI and data science from the Hartree Centre North East Hub has opened up new possibilities for us, and we’re excited to continue building on this foundation to drive innovation and collaboration."

- Amanda MacCannell, Pathways Open

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Further Information

This work was completed as part of one of our collaborative data projects. The projects are up to 12 weeks in duration and give you access to a wide range of expertise across our team of data scientists and data engineers. We will work alongside your team to scope your data science or engineering project, build a prototype solution, and explore options to deploy it within your organisation. You can learn more about them on our webpage here.

If you would like to learn more about the Hartree Centre North East Hub or our collaborative data projects, please get in touch with us at: hello@hartreenortheast.uk

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