Above: video of Thomas Wood presenting Harmony at the Pydata on 27 March 2024
Update: you can download the slides from the presentation here
Link to the meet up: Meetup.com.
I will present our work on Harmony, harmonydata.ac.uk, which is a free online AI research 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”.
This is called harmonisation.
Harmonisation is a time consuming and subjective process. Going through long PDFs of questionnaires and putting the questions into Excel is no fun.
We’ve been working on an open source Python library and free web tool called Harmony which uses natural language processing and generative AI models to help researchers harmonise questionnaire items, even in different languages.
Fast Data Science is a leading data science consultancy firm providing bespoke machine learning solutions for businesses of all sizes across the globe. With a focus on innovation and collaboration, Fast Data Science empowers businesses to leverage the transformative power of data.
Unleash the potential of your NLP projects with the right talent. Post your job with us and attract candidates who are as passionate about natural language processing.
Hire NLP ExpertsMany companies and organisations have large datasets that are stored in a very unstructured format. For example, you could work for a US based healthcare provider or insurer and have patient records stored in a free text format such as HL7 files or PDFs. A building regulator, land registry, or mortgage provider may have texts and accompanying diagrams from thousands of building inspections or land title deeds. A patent attorney’s office may have records of patent applications in PDF format.

On 20 May, I attended the Expert Witness Conference in Dublin, Ireland, organised by La Touche Training. It was an eye opening event with a mixture of lawyers and expert witnesses in different fields from Ireland and abroad. The event was chaired by Mr Justice Michael Peart, with a keynote address by the Honourable Mr Justice David Barniville, President of the High Court of Ireland.

Fast Data Science at Ireland’s Expert Witness Conference on 20 May 2026 in Dublin Links to guidance on legal AI issued by legal authorities and other organisations Official guidance UK: Artificial Intelligence (AI) Guidance for Judicial Office Holders, 31 October 2025. https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Artificial-Intelligence-AI-Guidance-for-Judicial-Office-Holders-2.pdf
What we can do for you