Our goal is to help biomimicry practitioners identify and apply bio-inspired design solutions to specific engineering design challenges using our expertise in software development, AI, and Machine Learning.

We use the design thinking process, to make sure our research, design and development is user-centered. Part of that process is creating quick prototypes to validate the usefulness of ideas. Our prototypes can be found here.

BIDARA is a GPT-4 chatbot that was instructed to help scientists and engineers understand, learn from, and emulate the strategies used by living things to create sustainable designs and technologies.

BIDARA can guide users through the Biomimicry Institute’s Design Process, a step-by-step method to propose biomimetic solutions to challenges. This process includes defining the problem, biologizing the challenge, discovering natural models, abstracting design strategies, and emulating nature's lessons.

1. Read the PeTaL paper.
2. Familiarize yourself with the Biomimicry Design Process as many of our project goals relate to automating or assisting with steps in this process:
3. Read the blog article, Kanban 101, to understand the agile framework we use for PeTaL.
4. If you will be working with Large Language Models these resources will be helpful.
5. If you will be working on ML model building. Read these first: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.02497.pdf, https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.12808.pdf. This NLP textbook may be a good resource as well. NLP SOTA
6. Find a task to work on from the backlog and assign yourself to it. Highest priority tasks are at the top of the backlog column. If you have questions about a task, let the team know.
7. Work on the task, moving it through the columns from left to right, until it is complete.
8. Repeat Step 6.