Making space for Indigenous AI

Following the reception of the New Frontiers of Research Fund Transformation grant of almost $23 million, Concordia University’s Abundant Intelligences research program is still developing as the project continues to grow.

Part of that development was the publication of a paper in the journal AI & Society, where they outlined the research and writing they had done in their ultimately successful funding application.

“It’s a peer-reviewed journal article. So, it’s in an academic register, but I still think it’s pretty accessible,” said Jason Edward Lewis, professor at Concordia, co-director of Abundant Intelligences, and the lead author on the paper.

Hēmi Whaanga, professor at Massey University in New Zealand, and Ceyda Yolgörmez, a postdoctoral fellow with Abundant Intelligences, also contributed to the paper, titled Abundant intelligences: placing AI within Indigenous knowledge frameworks.

“It gives a good background on the kinds of research that’s been done into the ways in which these AI systems are perpetuating and amplifying biases of different sorts, against women, minorities, Indigenous people, the whole list just sort of takes all the existing biases and prejudices in society and kind of amplifies them,” said Lewis.

He said the team is cognizant that artificial intelligence technologies are not unanimously praised, and that they themselves come at it from a skeptic’s point of view.

“We’re not boosters, we’re not rah-rah AI is going to save the world,” said Lewis.

“We talk about why it’s important for Indigenous people to engage with AI in the paper. We know that not everybody agrees with that position. Our position is AI is going to happen, and we would rather fight our way to a place at the table. In fact, what we would rather do is create our own table, where we build this stuff ourselves, but we feel as a group that if we ignore it, it just means it’s going to be really bad for Indigenous people, whereas we think that we have an opportunity to maybe design and develop AI that is good for Indigenous communities.”

The paper also lays out the ways the different research groups at different institutions - which they call pods - will cooperate with local communities.

“Part of the reason why we have this pod structure is we wanted to have the majority of the research happen in really close cooperation with their local community. Of course, there’s one of the biggest challenges. When you’re doing research, is easy to say you’re going to be in collaboration with an Indigenous community, and then not actually do it,” said Lewis.

“I think it’s interesting to look at that, because that’s a different model for doing AI development, for figuring out what kind of AI do we want, instead of having it imposed by other people,” said Lewis, who is Hawaiian and Samoan.

Lewis said the project has still very much been in the development phase.

“We really spent most of the last year putting the plumbing in place, putting the infrastructure in place, to get the projects up and going, hiring staff and creating policies,” said Lewis.

The Concordia team now numbers six people, with plans to expand to 10 in the coming months. The expansion and creation of other pods in places like the University of Lethbridge and Western University make up another dozen or so hires to have joined those groups.

“It’s been one of the most challenging things I’ve done. I mean, it’s been super exciting as well. But scaling up is hard,” said Lewis.

Many members of the project went to New Zealand in November for about two weeks for Abundant Intelligences’ second annual general meeting, hosted by Maori there.

“We started in northern New Zealand, and we went all the way to the south end, and we got to know each other. It’s hugely beneficial to collaborative opportunities, because now people know each other, they feel like they can get an email going and they can get on Zoom with somebody in Hawaii or Lethbridge and feel like they know one another and talk about research projects together.”

Abundant Intelligences’ paper is available, free of charge, online via the Concordia website or by looking up the title of the paper on Google.

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