TIME100 AI 2024: Endang Aminudin Aziz

S aving Indonesia’s more than 700 languages is a daunting task. Only a handful of them have enough scripts—or writing symbols—for recording and preservation and a lot of them lack proper documentation. But Endang Aminudin Aziz, 56, is on top of it with the help of large language models (LLMs). Heading the language development and cultivation agency within Indonesia’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology since 2020, Aminudin has worked with universities, language activists, and local communities to collect data for their LLMs, one of the few such government-led initiatives worldwide.

Aminudin says his agency is also developing an AI tool to detect the vitality of local languages in communities. Despite working with limited data sets—the agency has a little over 350 dictionaries for each unique language, many of which are still incomplete—Aminudin is undeterred. He is calling on tech firms to collaborate with the agency in preserving what he believes to be the “wealth” of Indonesia: “We learn from the past by knowing the local languages, and because of the functions of local languages, we have to make it available to the next generation, and technology is the key.”

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