The Yegatu Digital Project: Fostering Digital Writing in and with Indigenous Communities in the Amazon

We invite you to attend the second lecture of the Crisis and Memory: Digital Oral History Laboratory, dedicated to the Yegatu Digital Project, a result of the collaboration between IBM Research Brazil and the University of São Paulo. Project uses digital and AI-based tools to foster the use of indigenous languages that are in danger of disappearing. These tools include spell checkers, next-word predictors and dictionaries, and are being co-designed co-developed with Indigenous communities from the Baré ethnicity in the Amazon, through the use of digital classrooms which were deployed in two communities in July of 2025. We talk about the motivations of this work, ethical issues when working with Indigenous communities, and the process of expanding the project to other communities.

The lecture will be conducted by Professor Claudio Pinhanez. Claudio got his PhD. in 1999 from the MIT Media Laboratory where he did pioneer multidisciplinary research on computer vision and narrative-based interactive spaces. He has worked at IBM Research since 1999 in areas such as ubiquitous computing, service design, social media analytics and, more recently, natural language processing. He is currently a Principal Scientist in the laboratory of IBM Research in Brazil. He is also the Deputy Director of the Center for Artificial Intelligence of the University of São Paulo. Since 2022 he leads a joint project of IBM Research and the University of São Paulo focused on the use of AI technology to document and vitalize Brazilian Indigenous languages.