Data Scientists at the Hartree Centre North East Hub worked with Cognassist to create a large language model tool to provide users with personalised recommendations.

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Challenge

Employers and educators increasingly recognise the legal, ethical, and economic benefits of supporting neurodiverse individuals (e.g., those with ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia). The main challenge for organisations is identifying each person’s unique cognitive differences and strengths to tailor support effectively, a key aspect of neuro-inclusion. Cognassist wanted to create a product that can break down these barriers, with support that is customised to the individual. They came to us with an existing platform that helps empower neurodiversity awareness in business and wanted to expand on this with bespoke strategy recommendations for users.

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Approach

This was a highly collaborative project and involved rapid prototype development across both the Cognassist and Hartree teams. We developed an agentic large language model (LLM) system that can gather relevant information from a user, and suggest customised strategies based on their needs. This required tooling to semantically search for strategies based on their meaning. Agent prompts were used to control how user information was combined with strategies to generate recommendations. The great thing about LLM systems is that no coding is required to update their behaviour, which meant that we were able Benefits to have domain experts directly working on the prototype. A range of tests were designed to evaluate the final product.

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Benefits

A key outcome of the project is that Cognassist engineers now have experience of building agentic AI systems. They can go on to use this knowledge to develop and adapt their products and services into the future. Ultimately this will allow Cognassist users to conversationally discuss and ask questions to discover Cognassist strategies tailored specifically to them. This will allow them to adapt their approach to work and lead to healthier, more productive workplace environments. The collaboration between the Hartree North East Hub and different parts of the Cognassist team has paved the way towards closer working relationships between technical developers and subject domain experts.

"I’ve found that the collaboration with the Hartree Centre North East Hub has been fantastic. When I first joined the project, I was a total AI novice, but I do now have a deeper understanding of what is and what isn’t possible with AI."

- Callum Clift, Cognassist

“The Hartree Centre North East Hub helped us to explore what is possible in the rapidly evolving LLM space. We now have a broader understanding of the challenges and opportunities that these systems present, which gives us a solid foundation for future work in building our AI capabilities at Cognassist.”

- Will Brown, Cognassist

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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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