fter Conrad Begay finished his master’s degree in electrical engineering in December, the Navajo Technical University graduate went straight into teaching at his alma mater, with plans to pursue his PhD there.
Begay is also actively involved in leveling up NTU’s curriculum around the biggest topic in not just electrical engineering and computer science, but in all of academia: artificial intelligence. And to make AI a relevant and useful tool to the Navajo Nation.
So in July, Begay and three NTU students — Jonathan Smith (electrical engineering), Shannon Smith (business), and Marilane Descheny (business) — visited UC Berkeley to learn more about the university’s STEM and entrepreneurship activities after spending several weeks working with a trio of MDevEng students on projects expanding NTU’s business and AI offerings.
DevEng’s partnership with NTU goes back to 2022, when DevEng programs Director Yael Perez and NTU professor (and Begay’s advisor) Peter Romine presented a proposal for an engineering program centered on Indigenous sovereignty at an American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference. (Perez also serves as program coordinator for the Native FEWS Alliance.)
Last summer, several MDevEng students visited NTU’s campus in Crownpoint, New Mexico to work with faculty and fellow students on a variety of engineering projects, ranging from solar energy to air quality monitoring.
This year, the NTU delegation’s tours of Berkeley’s labs, schools, and centers were an opportunity to see what lessons could be taken back to the tribal college for how to implement various STEM programs.
Along with Perez, the quartet learned about nuclear energy development for Indigenous peoples at the SALT lab, met with civil and environmental engineering Prof. Evan Variano, received advice from Prof. Eric Van Dusen about open-source AI education tools like Jupyter notebooks, and surveyed drones and quadrupeds used for social impact. The NTU students also received a crash course in Berkeley’s entrepreneurial ecosystem during a tour of Bakar Bio Labs, an incubator for life-sciences startups developing technologies to benefit society, by the Labs’ COO, Jeremy Alberga.
After a week on campus, they drove up to Ukiah to spend another week with the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, which culminated in the nation’s annual Big Time event.
Before their visit, however, MDevEng students were back at NTU, developing curricula and programs grounded in Diné (Navajo) values, community control over data, and social impact.
Shannon Smith collaborated with Sharon Wachira to create an AI micro-credential program guided, like the other projects, by Sa’ah Naaghái Bik’eh Hózhóón: “living in balance and harmony.”
Over 45 hours, the program’s students would study AI literacy and ethics before picking two of the following tracks: generative AI and productivity, data analysis and decision making, AI for community and professional practice, and AI innovation and community solutions. Every track includes material on ethics, data sovereignty, and tribal community connection.
Descheny teamed up with Kamilah Idris on developing NTU’s version of the Big Ideas Contest, Berkeley’s flagship student social entrepreneurship contest that is housed, like DevEng, at the Blum Center.
Contestants’ innovations across different topical tracks would be judged, in part, on community benefit: Does the project restore community balance rather than extract from it? They would go through the same stages as Berkeley Big Ideas teams: a pre-proposal, a full proposal, workshops, and a showcase with awards.
Like all NTU–MDevEng projects, the use of AI and data processing must respect privacy, prevent extraction, and maintain tribal control, Descheny and Idris said.
Though it was designed for NTU, it will be “completely replicable for every tribal college in the country,” Descheny added.
Begay and Jonathan Smith, meanwhile, worked with Chuol Ruei Deng on designing a 16-week course on AI and Indigenous innovation that, like the other projects, bases its curriculum in four pillars of the Diné philosophy of education, Nitsáhákees, Nahat’á, Iiná, and Siih Hasin: “thinking, planning, living, and reflecting.”
“Indigenous innovation is not content added to an AI course,” they explained. “It is the lens through which AI is evaluated, questioned, and built.”
“The most rewarding part,” Deng said during his collaborators’ visit to the Bay Area, “was seeing how much more honest and specific AI education becomes when it is designed for a real place rather than a generic student population.”
Though he arrived at NTU knowing how to evaluate a machine learning model for bias, build a data pipeline, and source and verify research, “what I had not done before,” he added, “was figure out how to make all of that genuinely useful to a student who has never taken a computer science course but who lives next to an abandoned uranium mine, hauls water by truck, and belongs to a sovereign nation with its own legal infrastructure that predates AI entirely.”
