Several members of the Advanced Computing and Information Systems Laboratory (ACIS) from the University of Florida attended the SPNHC-TDWG 2024 Conference, Sept. 2-6, 2024 in Okinawa, Japan. Attendees included, Dr. José A.B. Fortes, Founder and Director of the ACIS Lab., Manuel Luciano, Systems Administrator and Michael Elliott, Graduate Research Assistant.

Michael Elliott, PhD student, presented “Integrating LLMs and the iDigBio portal for conversational data exploration and inference”

“We created a chatbot that helps users discover species occurrence records in the iDigBio portal and provide statistics about them. The chatbot is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4o large language model. It’s carefully designed to mitigate the “hallucination” problem, where large language models tend to make up information and cite non-existent publications. This is accomplished by 1) enabling the chatbot to use iDigBio’s online APIs to find and summarize real scientific data and 2) an array of validation steps that ensure the chatbot’s responses meet certain quality standards. The chatbot will be made publicly available on acis.ufl.edu in the near future.” Presentation (29:57 – 45:18)

Gallery

For more information on the SPNHC/TDWG 2024 conference, click here.