Barry Hardy

Barry Hardy (Edelweiss Connect)

Dr. Barry Hardy is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) at Edelweiss Connect where he is leading its team supporting the development of new integrating solutions in industrial product design and safety assessment and the translation of research methods to industrial practice. Examples of recent commercial developments include the creation of the SaferWorldbyDesign platform (https://www.saferworldbydesign.com/), and the development of the SaferSkin (https://saferworldbydesign.com/saferskin/) and EdelweissData products (https://saferworldbydesign.com/edelweissdata/). He is currently leading the development of risk assessment knowledge infrastructure and solutions, including new approach methods, SaferbyDesign, sustainability, and next-generation risk assessment solutions (https://www.risk-hunt3r.eu).

AI-assistance in Knowledge Collection and Curation supporting Safe and Sustainable by Design workflows

We discuss the use of data science, modelling and AI techniques to assist the collection, generation and use of evidence as a critical strategic New Approach Method (NAM) methodology supporting Safe and Sustainable by Design (SSbD) goals. Valuable assistance is obtained from transformative tools that use data and scientific techniques to perform more accurate, ethical, and comprehensive assessments, embedded into SSbD decision-making workflows. To achieve this goal, full use of existing data, models and knowledge should be leveraged into providing relevant information supporting assessment and decision goals between alternatives in early stage innovation. Such data needs to be integrated with evidence-weighting and scoring schemes, including uncertainty, to reach initial decisions on alternatives and to plan for subsequent refinement phases. The findings may include recommendations for generating the most meaningful and useful data to address gaps and uncertainty. We will demonstrate the methodology followed and questions arising from current SSBD4CheM case study work applying SSbD to chemicals, polymers and advanced materials.

Here we will present on resources we have developed for:

• Collection, extraction and curation of knowledge from literature, toxicology databases and safety data sheets;
• Demonstration and access to knowledge collection tools and resources;
• Hazard profiling of product formulations and ingredients;
• Knowledge infrastructure for characterisation of materials;
• SSbD Workflows documenting case study results.