Bridging Futures: Can AI Serve as a Keeper of Heritage, Culture, and Oral Histories?

2019 Myself and over 4,000 villagers from our Viet diaspora community gathered in Miami, FL at the first and only An Bang Villagers Abroad Conference. I was awarded 1st Place for my essay exploring multifaceted themes of identity: first-generation, being born an An Bang native, growing up in America, and more. 

At the event, we were dictated for the first time in our lives a brief history of An Bang Village, presented by a Cultural Subcommittee of volunteers whom are also our village elders. 

2023 I read about and was incredibly inspired by several sociocultural knowledge graph efforts, especially including the "Indigenous Knowledge Graph". 

I really want to use the technical skills I'm building in my PhD, i.e. knowledge graph construction, ontology curation, graph database querying, contributing to open-source software projects, AI/ML, to help preserve my village's extensive 400-year history before it disappears even further as our Vietnamese diaspora community becomes further disconnected from one another.

More info here for those interested in reading further:

• "Teaching Heritage to AI Through Storytelling"

• "Indigenous Knowledge Graph" from Intelligent Voices of Wisdom: Learnings

• "Native Processing: Intelligence Voices of Wisdom Teaches Native Culture to AI"

• "A Study On the Construction of Knowledge Graph of Yunjin Video Resources Under Productive Conservation"

2023 I'm so lucky to have such supportive PhD mentors and thesis chair. With their help and encouragement from Penn's Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships (CURF), I was able to submit my proposal titled, "Bridging Futures: Artificial Intelligence & Emerging Tech in Vietnam's Digital Revolution."

2024 I stumbled upon this funding opportunity from Microsoft Research that looked really fascinating. It was framed around AI & Society and I wanted to develop some of the ideas from my Fulbright proposal further, so I ended up submitting a "Hail Mary" application.

Unfortunately, I wasn't selected. But hey, I'm really proud of myself for going for these types of opportunities no matter what. I found out later that I lost to a Full Tenured Professor! I'm going to take that as a good sign and keep pushing.

2024 I was starting to really doubt myself for putting myself out there, especially writing up a proposal on ideas I'm passionate about and want to be able to go out into the world to try..

After several months of waiting, I got news at the start of 2024 that I advanced onto Fulbright Semi-Finalist status!!!

2024 Before too long, I was also invited to submit a pitch to the National Geographic Enhancement Award which is integrated with the US Fulbright Student Program. Getting selected would allow me to undertake a storytelling component of my original Fulbright proposal (it would be unlike anything else I've ever had the opportunity to do).

My NGS proposal is titled, "Bridging Futures: Can AI Serve as a Keeper of Heritage, Culture, and Oral Histories?" 

Fingers crossed!