The Jane Goodall Institute has handwritten notes on 5 generations of chimps. AI is helping to preserve them.

For over sixty years, renowned primatologist Jane Goodall and her dedicated team have been meticulously observing chimpanzees in East Africa. During these observations, field researchers document their findings through handwritten notes, capturing every detail every 15 minutes for a single chimp and every minute for mothers and infants. These notes, penned in various languages such as English and Swahili, require significant effort to digitize. Lilian Pintea, Vice President of Conservation Science at the Jane Goodall Institute, explained that the organization has faced ongoing challenges with a multi-year backlog of data waiting to be uploaded into their digital systems, a practice that has been ongoing since they created their first digital database in 1997. In 2025, Pintea initiated the use of large language models to expedite the digitization process of over 500,000 pages of handwritten notes, making this vital scientific data more accessible to researchers associated with the nonprofit established by Goodall in 1977. Following Goodall's passing in October 2025, the urgency to preserve her legacy by digitizing her handwritten notes intensified. "AI represents a continuation of a long history of technology cycles that we have embraced," Pintea stated. One of the primary obstacles faced by the Jane Goodall Institute is the management of extensive and varied data collected over five generations of chimpanzee observations. University researchers who visit Gombe typically archive their findings—ranging from physical notes to multimedia files—within their respective institutions. To streamline access to this data, the Institute is developing a new data management tool in collaboration with Amazon Web Services, known as the Gombe AI Research Platform. This platform aims to centralize and facilitate easier collaboration among researchers. The initiative began in March 2025 when Goodall delivered an inspiring keynote at the AWS Imagine Conference. It was during this event that Pintea first explored a potential partnership with AWS. Initially, the intention was to utilize AI for identifying medicinal plant usage in chimpanzee video footage, but this idea was later deemed too niche. By June 2025, the focus shifted to developing a more broadly applicable tool for photo and video analysis, leveraging an existing technology called WISE, created by the University of Oxford. Taimur Rashid, Managing Director of the Generative AI Innovation Center at AWS, noted that this collaboration would allow researchers to save hours that would otherwise be spent manually reviewing footage. "Our goal is to convert years of analog data into a digitized, searchable format that incorporates generative AI, enabling a deeper understanding of these extensive datasets," he explained. In August 2025, a breakthrough occurred when the AWS team joined Pintea and field researchers in Gombe National Park, realizing that their tool could also assist in digitizing handwritten records. The Gombe AI Research Platform is set to provide functionalities like multimedia search, video scene detection, chimpanzee facial recognition, AI-driven behavioral analysis, and automated data processing and translation. As of early 2026, the teams are actively working on the platform's requirements and workflows to enhance research efficiency. Some researchers have already begun testing the Gombe AI Research Platform, which is anticipated to be fully operational by late 2026. The project also includes creating a specialized dictionary based on 65 years of field notes and understanding a unique dialect of Swahili specific to Gombe. Pintea is optimistic that the integration of AI will significantly reduce the six-year backlog of undigitized data. He also envisions that the Gombe AI Research Platform will serve not just the Jane Goodall Institute, but also other field researchers, Ph.D. students, and undergraduates. In the context of ongoing research, the Institute's AI initiatives are making real-time field data more accessible, particularly for those studying the unprecedented civil war occurring among two chimpanzee groups in Uganda's Kibale National Park. "Understanding our closest living relatives helps us gain insights into human evolution and, ultimately, our own identity," Pintea concluded.