Researchers in Israel are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to comb through piles of records to try to identify hundreds of thousands of Jewish people killed in the Holocaust whose names are missing from official memorials.
In the build-up to those commemorations, staff at the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre in Jerusalem said they were working to step up searches for details of known and unknown victims after developing their own AI-powered software.
Over the years, volunteers have tracked down information on 4.9 million individuals by reading through statements and documents, checking film footage, cemeteries and other records.
Technology is more exact
“It’s very hard for a human being to do it – just to go over everything and not miss any details,” Esther Fuxbrumer, head of software development at the center, told Reuters.
There are huge gaps in their existing 9 million records. The Nazis “just took people, shot them, and covered them in a pit. And there was no one left to tell about them,” Fuxbrumer said.
The AI system, developed over the past two years to sift through records in English, Hebrew, German, Russian and other languages, is currently undergoing tests.
Source: The Jerusalem Post
