Research Pods

Hiringa te Mahara

Hiringa te Mahara is located in Aotearoa, New Zealand and hosted at Massey University in Palmerston North, and supported by Te Hiku Media in Kaitaia.

Massey University; Te Hiku Media

Palmerston North; Kaitaia

Community Partners:

The Research:

Hiringa te Mahara is hosted at Massey University in Palmerston North, and supported by Te Hiku Media in Kaitaia. Indigenous team members within the project also travel to various communities in Aotearoa to run and facilitate wānanga (intensive discussions/deliberations). This Pod focuses on articulating, shaping, and designing AI through a Māori lens. Their work is founded on Māori methodologies, epistemologies, ontologies, modes of engagement, practice, and language. Hiringa te Mahara mobilizes AI technology to explore the centrality of hapū (kinship group) and connection in creative, language, cultural, and wellbeing contexts. In particular, Hiringa te Mahara works with Indigenous AI scientists and engineers to develop methods for incorporating and assessing how AI-based tools that integrate an Indigenous worldview can be applied to data and datasets.

The ultimate goal is to develop AI that brings a more holistic Māori-centric picture of language, culture, health, wellbeing, whakapapa (genealogical connection), and connectivity to Māori data and data sets. Projects hosted by the Pod are grounded in kaupapa Māori methodologies. They use mixed methods with wānanga to shape how the underlying computational architectures might need to be reshaped to inform different kawa / tikanga (shifting customs and practices), place, space, and design. This Pod is led by experts in Indigenous epistemologies and methodologies (Smith); Māori epistemology, ontology, ceremony, practice, and incantation (Temara); Māori creative practice (Johnson); Indigenous NLP and community-centred language revitalization (Jones; Mahelona); neuroscience (Cheung); AI, VR and mixed reality, digital artifacts, digital repositories (Shedlock) data and linguistics and ethics (Whaanga).