Michael Running Wolf is a Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet indigenous man who grew up in Montana. He's worked for Amazon, but eventually left in order to pursue his lifelong goal of building XR experiences that integrate with AI for language education and to reclaim and preserve indigenous languages. The biggest blocker is that most natural language processing approaches have a hard to dealing with the infinite words that come from polysynthetic languages like many North American indigenous languages.

I had a chance to catch up with Running Wolf at Augmented World Expo where he talked about his aspirations for researching solutions to these open problems, and eventually creating immersive experiences that can create a dynamic relational context that alters how indigenous languages are spoken. Also be sure to check out Running Wolf on a panel discussion about "New Technology, Old Property Laws" at the Existing Law and Extended Reality Symposium at the Stanford Cyber Policy Center along with fellow panelists including Mark Lemley, Tiffany Li, and Micaela Mantegna.

This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.

Music: Fatality