Platform developed by volunteer technologists will leverage natural language processing to accelerate analysis of mental impacts of pandemic

Morgan Stanley and the Child Mind Institute today announced the results of the judging from Morgan Stanley’s Machine Learning for Good Hackathon, which leveraged natural language processing (NLP) to analyze COVID-related mental health data. The resulting text analytic tool could lead to drastic improvements in data analysis and trend analysis going forward. With an automated platform, analyses can be performed in real time, allowing the linkage of qualitative to quantitative survey data and yielding valuable insight into ongoing public health crises.

The Child Mind Institute is a national non-profit organization dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders, and a founding member of the Morgan Stanley Alliance for Children’s Mental Health.

The competition involved 141 Morgan Stanley developers in 29 teams across 19 offices who used their machine learning expertise to build models for analyzing more than 6,000 open-ended text responses from the Child Mind Institute’s research. These responses came from participants in the Coronavirus Health and Impact Survey (CRISIS) and focus groups covering key topics relating to mental health challenges and resilience during the pandemic.

The teams were tasked with collaborating via an open-source development model to build NLP-based solutions. These solutions were designed to help the Child Mind Institute’s researchers understand and draw meaningful insights from various free-form textual data sources like those from the CRISIS survey. Three teams of finalists comprised of developers from different divisions and offices around the globe were selected to present their models to a panel of senior Morgan Stanley technology leaders and Child Mind Institute researchers. Key features in the three prototypes include clustering, topic modeling and sentiment analysis, and they also addressed the longitudinal aspect of the datasets, in which researchers run the surveys multiple times. The winning solution will be custom built into a fully-fledged analysis tool by Morgan Stanley experts through the firm’s Tech Change Makers pro bono program and remain open source to encourage continuous collaboration.

The CRISIS survey, funded by Morgan Stanley was developed by researchers from the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute to better understand the psychological and physical impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The project also aims to inform priorities for interventions and policy changes to address the mental health consequences of the pandemic. It includes commentary from thousands of survey participants from the U.S. and UK and is currently being administered in more than eight countries with translations into several languages.

“We are grateful to all of the Morgan Stanley team members across four continents who answered the call to contribute their time, talents and passion to this effort,” said Michael P. Milham, MD, PhD, vice president of research and founding director of the Center for the Developing Brain at the Child Mind Institute. “The solution developed by the winning team, as well as the insights from their colleagues, will not only help us maximize the impact of existing CRISIS survey data, but also inform the development and analysis of other public health surveys.”

“We have machine learning experts in virtually every function and every office around the world,” said Steve Mavin, CIO for Institutional Securities Technology and co-chair of the Technology Philanthropy Committee at Morgan Stanley. “It’s been a tremendous pleasure to see them collaborate in diverse teams and across functions to give back to such an important cause and apply their technical excellence and deep machine learning expertise to a problem and topic that could shape generations to come.”

About Morgan Stanley

Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS) is a leading global financial services firm providing investment banking, securities, investment management and wealth management services. With offices in more than 41 countries, the Firm's employees serve clients worldwide including corporations, governments, institutions and individuals. For more information about Morgan Stanley, please visit www.morganstanley.com.

About the Child Mind Institute

The Child Mind Institute is dedicated to transforming the lives of children and families struggling with mental health and learning disorders by giving them the help they need to thrive. We’ve become the leading independent nonprofit in children’s mental health by providing gold-standard care, delivering educational resources to millions of families each year, training educators in underserved communities, and developing tomorrow’s breakthrough treatments. Together, we truly can transform children’s lives.

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