Mação Project uses AI and community memory to think future

“ O computer won't give us the answers about the decisions the community has to make. They will always be political options of the current society ", said Luiz Oosterbeek, professor of the Polytechnic Institute of Tomar (IPT) and president of the Terra e Memória Institute (ITM).

The Agora – Cultural Landscape Community AI Hub has an epicenter in Mação, in the district of Santarém, and started at the beginning of this year with three pilot projects: one in the parish of Ortiga and two in Brazil, with an indigenous community of Xingu, in the Amazon, and an Afrodescendant community in Rio de Janeiro.

The initiative aims to gather scientific knowledge, historical documents, photographs, memories, traditions and knowledge of populations in a digital archive that can be questioned through AI, incorporating information dispersed in the reflection on public policies and development of territories.

“ It is possible to design convergent but not equal strategies”, explained Oosterbeek, arguing that priorities vary between territories and that public policies will hardly be effective without the involvement of populations.

In Ortiga, where the ITM and the Mação Museum have been working with the community for several years, part of the historical, ethnographic and cultural documentation has already been digitized and interviews to the population began.

The researcher exemplified that the system could cross centuries of documentation to understand how communities have responded in the past to current problems, such as fires, depopulation or aging, recovering experienced solutions or even hypotheses that have never been tested.

“ We are creating an information collection that will allow future decisions to be taken “using all available information,” he said, stressing that technology allows simultaneously working texts, images, oral records and handwritten documentation.

Agora began this week also in Hainan, China, where co-coordinator Erika Robrahn Gonzalez is located, at the request of a region that invited the ITM to apply the methodology in the territorial organization. A partnership with the Mauritius is still agreed.

“It’s a very big challenge for us,” Oosterbeek said about joining China, adding that experience in different cultural contexts will allow us to realize “what is common and what is different” in the application of the model.

The initiative, supported by the European Academy, was approved in 2025, but the team has only now chosen to disclose publicly when there are already results, publications and projects on the ground.

“ We wanted to be able to have this disclosure already with concrete results”, explained Oosterbeek, considering it particularly relevant that a Chinese region had requested the use of the methodology in the organization of its territory.

The technological infrastructure installed in Mação benefits from funding from the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) under the PRR, which allowed ITM to acquire six supercomputers and programs for the development of the project.

The team also plans to bring AI literacy training to communities, alerting to the limitations and risks of technology, while personal data and information provided remain subject to rules of confidentiality and to defined agreements with populations.

“ Who will decide what can be placed and made available are the people of the community, are not the researchers ", avenged Oosterbeek.

The researcher considers NOW to be a “modest” but “very revolutionary” instrument for incorporating knowledge and community proposals into the definition of public policies, aiming for the methodology to be used in other territories.