Tracker Data Projects

Partner: ANU
Commissioned by: MOD.

Every game Adam Goodes played produced approximately 20 million data points via 27 Earth orbiting satellites. These planetary-scale surveillance systems tracked his and other players every move, 10 times per second. 
Despite this vast system of player surveillance, there is little understanding of its implications outside of quantifying individual player performance. This predominantly physiological focus neglects the cultural and political complexities within artificial intelligence - the machine itself, the bodies it trains for automation, the performance it captures and the cultural inputs it doesn't. A proliferation of data streams are being generated from diverse human activities at unprecedented rates. Generating deep insights within this data through analytics and AI is possible, however relies on the cultural formation of the framework to interrogate the magnitude of these data sets. 

Old Ways, New brings together Adam Goodes and Baden Pailthorpe in partnership with ANU’s College of Computer Sciences and Software Engineering to design new software development methodologies and spatial technologies that embody the complex interrelationships of data, tracking elite bodies, Indigenous pattern thinking, spatial awareness and navigation. 

Ngapulara Ngarngarnyi Wirra (Our Family Tree), 2022 reveals the cultural significance of Adam’s AFL tracker data through Adnyamathanha Yarta (country), Kinship and Ngarwala (language). The Tracker Data project realises an opportunity to build new culturally informed technologies which embed Indigenous Traditional Knowledges and protocols into the overarching framework and architecture, with the intent and capacity to deliver broad social, cultural and environmental impact, better usability, and deeper insights. This project reclaims, repatriates and reimagines the unique and rich archive of Adam Goodes’ AFL tracker data to reveal the hidden dimensions of the cultural inputs though significant Adnyamathanha forms such as Adam’s ancestors, the Wirra (tree), Adnja (rock), Ngairri (sky) and Vari (river bed). 

The research and development process for this project will decompress the reductive nature of data capture by bringing to life the cultural relationships and knowledges inherent in Adam’s performance as an elite Indigenous athlete and leader. 

Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence Incubator

Partner: Goethe-Institut

In 1843 an early settler come across a fishing machine built by Indigenous Australians. Made from plant fibre and sticky string the device would sling snared fish up to the banks of the Victoria’s Murray River. It required no handling from the operator, instead utilising the energy of the flowing river. The settler’s assessment of the invention wasn’t exactly glowing, “Lazy blackfellas” was the gist of it. “Wont even work for their dinner'“. Flash forward 176 years and whitefellas are finally paying autonomous machines some respect. It makes you wonder what other inventions were overlooked. Tyson Yunkaporta

Read the full Smith Journal article on the Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence workshops here. The Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence Incubator is the second iteration of the IP AI initiative.

Angie Abdilla with Tyson Yunkaporta and Megan Kelleher bring together a deadly group of blackfellas from diverse cultural practices to collaborate with international Indigenous technologists and leading industry experts such as Genevieve Bell to rethink AI systems.

Learn more about the Old Ways, New Publication on Indigenous Protocols and Artificial  Intelligence (IP//AI), introducing ways to embed cultural protocols into programming logic.

In this paper we share our journey starting with an international group of Indigenous technologists at the inaugural workshop series in Hawaii in 2019, leading to the IP//AI Incubator in March, 2021.  

Key learnings from the foundations of these works were the need for Indigenous AI to be regional in nature, conception, design and development, to be tethered to localised Indigenous laws inherent to Country, to be guided by local  protocols to create the diverse standards and programming logic required for the developmental processes of AI, and to be designed with our future cultural interrelationships and interactions with AIs in mind.  

Read more via link here.

Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Workshops

Delivery Partner: CIFAR
Partners: Concordia University, Oxford University & Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Old Ways, New, along with colleagues at Concordia University and MIT, funded and convened a week-long event that focussed on Indigenous protocols and their pivotal role in the development of Artificial Intelligence. The workshop, co-designed and led by Old Ways, New, brought together Indigenous technologists from around the globe, along with artists, historians, linguists, software engineers, data scientists, poets, writers and researchers.

To develop the event, the partnership met every week across three timezones to map who should be involved, what Indigenous Technologists were doing globally and curate a group of attendees that was diverse in culture, gender, age and knowledges. All participants had demonstrated their prior commitment to utilising their cultural knowledges or old ways to inform the their practice in design and development.

This event supported 40 different Indigenous technologists to deepen their work and further apply the principles and insights developed during the workshop in practical forms.

One participant, Suzanne Kite, an Oglala Lakota woman from Concordia University in Montreal, shared a system she created using human hair as a living network of sensors that can interface with machine learning software. The future of technology, she believes, is not in what we can rip from the earth for a few more decades, but in an Indigenous understanding of biological hardware; resources we can grow ourselves, even from our own bodies. “How can Lakota understandings of hair affect the designs of technology? What does a Lakota data-visualisation interface look like?”

Environmental concerns were of concern to other participants, such as Megan Kelleher, a Baradha woman from Melbourne’s RMIT University who focuses on the connections between Indigenous knowledge and blockchain technologies. She shared some of the innovations being made in automation, which included designs for bots made from seaweed, and cybernetic organisms that can move through the water like eels. Maori attendees developed an AI based on a rigorous data sovereignty framework that is profoundly different from how most AI works.

A second series of workshops were conducted in Hawaii, with a smaller section of the working group to develop a Position Paper. This position paper is the culmination of a variety of Indigenous peoples perspectives on Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence and aims to support divergent and critically missing voices within the design and development of AI.