Fresno State professors Hanayo Oya and Dr. Aris Athanasios Panagopoulos have secured an AI Fast Challenge Grant for their Hibiki AI project, named so because it is an artificial intelligence project but also because it is a humanitarian one.
Hibiki roughly translates to “echo” or “sound” and AI roughly translates to “love” in Japanese. The goal of Hibiki AI is to digitally revive Japanese internment survivors to provide interactive historical testimony for users.
“We have a lot of archives at the [campus] library and nobody’s touching it. It’s just sleeping,” said Oya, professor of Media, Communications and Journalism at Fresno State. “So for me, it’s like a mountain of treasure and I thought we should utilize the archives for this project.”
The project is bolstered by Oya’s own interest in the U.S. detainment of Japanese American citizens during World War II. While covering a story in 2020, she said she asked many people if they knew about Japanese concentration camps and they said no.
Oya’s investigation into Fresno’s history of Japanese detainment led her to the Masadas, who both volunteered with Fresno State for decades keeping Fresno’s history of Japanese detainment alive by giving their testimony in Dr. Mary Husain’s Intercultural Communication and Persuasion classes.
Saburo Masada, who grew up in Caruthers, was detained with his family at the age of 12. He passed away in 2020 and is survived by his wife, Marion, who is also a camp survivor. His testimony exists in the publicly available records in the Fresno State Library. Oya said his story may never have been touched again sitting in the archives. He is the first in line to be digitally revived by this project to bring his story to many that would never have heard it.
Panagopoulos, professor of computer science, is directing the computer science side of the project that deals with artificial intelligence. He said this project is a great opportunity for computer science students to get involved and to use AI as a technological force for good.
He said there will be some challenges such as accuracy of the data the AI model is trained on. The data needs to be historically accurate paired with the need for data integrity from a more computer science perspective. Secondly, the project needs to be low cost and scalable.
The University of Southern California had a similar project that served as the inspiration for this project: the IWitness project. It relied on video recordings of the witness to create the data set for the interactive experience.
The project has started. Students who want to get involved can contact Oya at oya@mail.fresnostate.edu or Panagopoulos at apangopoulos@mail.fresnostate.edu.