Key facts
- The Jane Goodall Institute has over 500,000 pages of handwritten chimpanzee research data.
- AWS is collaborating with the institute to develop the Gombe AI Research Platform.
- The platform utilizes AI, including large language models, to digitize and analyze data.
- The tool aims to make scientific data more searchable and accessible to researchers.
- The platform will offer features like multimedia search, video scene detection, and facial recognition.
The Jane Goodall Institute is leveraging artificial intelligence, in collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), to digitize and analyze over 500,000 pages of handwritten chimpanzee research notes. This initiative, centered around the Gombe AI Research Platform, aims to overcome a significant backlog of data accumulated over decades. Field researchers have historically taken detailed notes every 15 minutes for individual chimpanzees and every minute for mothers and infants, a process that typically takes up to two days to manually enter into digital systems. The new platform, built using large language models and drawing on concepts from the University of Oxford's WISE tool, will enable multimedia search, video scene detection, chimpanzee facial recognition, behavioral analysis, and automated data processing and translation. This effort is crucial for preserving Jane Goodall's legacy and making the extensive research data more accessible to a global network of scientists studying chimpanzee behavior, evolution, and conservation. The platform is expected to be fully operational by the fourth quarter of 2026, with ongoing development including a specialized dictionary derived from 65 years of field notes and understanding a Gombe-specific dialect of Swahili.