Changing Children's Chances selected for AI pilot
02/02/2026
Melbourne Medical School’s (MMS) AI Co-Scientist Pilot Program offers mentorship in using an AI co-scientist platform in their research while developing best practices for the MMS research community. This pilot program is restricted to research projects using publicly available datasets only.
Changing Children's Chances (CCC) is one of three research teams joining this pilot program. Their project will measure multidimensional early childhood disadvantage at the area-level using publicly available data.
Data from the Australian Child & Youth Wellbeing Atlas (ACYWA) provides extensive child health and wellbeing indicators across themes adapted from the ARACY Nest Wellbeing Framework and Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) developmental vulnerability rates. Many ACYWA indicators capture area-level social, economic and environmental conditions that shape children’s experiences of disadvantage.
This project will demonstrate how AI co-scientist tools can be applied to public data to generate policy-relevant insights into multidimensional early childhood disadvantage. The application of AI to this project will support faster pattern recognition in massive data sets and complement the CCC team’s skillsets in identifying policy change opportunities to shift children’s developmental trajectories. This can support targeted investment and build capacity for more efficient use of existing data to address child health inequities.
At the conclusion of the program, the CCC team will share their experience through presentations, and develop an open-access researcher resource with a transparent, repeatable workflow and key learnings to help others apply AI co-scientist methods to population-level data.
