Cloud computing company AWS committed $1 million through its Generative AI Innovation Fund to support the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) in digitizing more than six decades of research on chimpanzees and baboons.
The project aims to preserve handwritten notes, film footage, and other historical records that remain in analog form. The funding will support a full digital transformation of JGI’s research archives, including personnel needs and the use of artificial intelligence tools to process and analyze data.
“Using a variety of multimodal large language models and embedding models on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, along with thoughtful prompt engineering, we’re unlocking new possibilities through AI-powered analysis of JGI’s archive of handwritten notes and videos,” said Taimur Rashid, managing director of the Generative AI Innovation Center at AWS.
AWS will work with Ode, which will design the user experience based on its work in research and conservation. The two organizations will help JGI apply AI in its research processes and build tools to make the archives easier to use.
“By unlocking these archives with generative and agentic AI technologies, we will amplify JGI’s mission and create a digital legacy that ensures Dr. Goodall’s pioneering work continues to inspire and guide future generations,” said Dr. Lilian Pintea, VP of Conservation Science of JGI-USA.
The initiative expands on an earlier proof-of-concept developed with the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center. The work will proceed in phases, starting with the full migration of JGI’s research data to AWS’s cloud infrastructure. The team will integrate different types of data, such as geographic information systems (GIS), satellite images, historical records, videos, and soundscapes, into one platform. This will allow researchers to search across materials that were previously stored in separate formats.
The project also includes developing an AI system that works with JGI’s databases to enable natural language search across decades of notes and observations. JGI will also introduce an online foundation portal for researchers around the world to query, analyze, and compare data.
The partnership’s goal is to protect Dr. Jane Goodall’s scientific legacy while giving researchers and conservation groups updated tools to continue work on primate behavior and habitat studies.
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