Research Team Won Award for Indigenous Language AI
Salamasina Fuimaono and her team were honored at the 2026 AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference for their language archival work.
Updated on Sept. 21, 2026 in Language Learning
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Salamasina Fuimaono and her research team have received the Best Research Project Award at the 2026 AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference. The award recognizes their work on building AI tools to identify Samoan and Yupik languages within public media archives.
Why it matters
Public media archives hold thousands of hours of material featuring unidentified languages. This project leverages AI to help preserve these tongues by identifying them within vast collections of historical media.
The award-winning research, titled Building AI Tools with Communities, focuses on identifying Samoan and Yupik languages. The study was presented in 2026 at the AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference.
The players
Salamasina Fuimaono
She serves as the Samoan Language Program Director at Saint Louis School and is a lecturer at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa.
Uifa'atali Amata
She serves as a member of Congress representing the territory of American Samoa.
The details
The research team collaborated with native and heritage speakers to develop tools capable of cataloging material in low-resource languages. The project aims to improve access to content that has remained unidentified in public archives.
Timeline
The AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference occurred in 2026.
Culture Shift
This project follows a pattern set by the AI4LAM community of developing specialized technological tools to address preservation gaps in cultural heritage institutions. It reflects a growing shift toward community-led AI development to protect low-resource languages globally.
This research could eventually allow local residents to more easily search and access historical media featuring Samoan and other regional languages. It highlights the role of Honolulu-based experts in advancing digital tools that support cultural preservation.
The takeaway
The use of AI in archives provides a viable pathway for protecting indigenous languages that are otherwise underrepresented in digital collections. Local researchers continue to demonstrate how community-centered technology can bridge the gap between heritage and modern tools.
Further reading
Learn more about local efforts to support indigenous education in the Language Learning section.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Samoa News.
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Do you believe using AI to preserve low-resource languages is a positive development for cultural heritage?
