AI Ethicist; Founder, Indigenous in AI
Michael Running Wolf (Northern Cheyenne/Lakota/Blackfeet) was raised in a rural prairie village with intermittent water and electricity on his mother’s reservation in Montana. Naturally he now has a master’s degree in computer science. He is a published poet but a computer nerd at heart with professional experience as an engineer for IBM, AT&T Wireless, Lawrence Livermore National Lab, and Amazon’s Alexa. He was faculty at Northeastern University and is the vice-president of software systems at an AI startup.
He is an AI ethicist who envisions an Indigenous future where Indigenous communities, alongside reclaiming their languages, attain technological sovereignty while addressing data ownership and systemic barriers to Indigenous AI. He is co-author of the Indigenous Protocol and Artificial Intelligence Position Paper, co-founder of IndigiGenius, as well as co-founder and lead architect of First Languages AI Reality (FLAIR). He is a 2024-25 The Tech for Global Good Laureate and, among other awards, his work researching an automatic speech recognition system for highly polysynthetic languages has been recognized with the Patrick J. McGovern AI for Humanity Prize.