This is an idea proposed in 2025 as a good starter project, and is currently being worked on by Radhika Agrawal. It is co-supervised with Alec Christie and Sadiq Jaffer.
We are building a Conservation Co-Pilot to improve worldwide
conservation action through evidence-driven insights. Biodiversity loss is one
of the biggest threats to our planet and to tackle it, we must improve the
effectiveness of conservation action, which currently falls short of its full
potential. This is because conservationists typically find it hard to access
locally relevant evidence on what works to conserve biodiversity as research
knowledge is not translated quickly or accessibly enough into policy and
practice. We therefore need to accelerate the transfer of relevant, reliable
evidence to decision-makers using more intuitive and interactive interfaces.
This project will use the comprehensive Conservation
Evidence database (holding 8600 studies that
have quantitatively tested 3600 actions) to evaluate the ability of a Mixture
of Agents (MOA) approach, and/or individual LLMs, at providing rigorous
evidence-based answers to priority questions from real conservationists.
This will extend our previous work that found that LLMs coupled
with a hybrid retrieval strategy can answer multiple choice conservation
questions as well as human experts. This will enable us to develop a
"Conservation Co-Pilot" that can handle complex and nuanced questions from
different users.