Dani Ramos Ojeda '25 (Nahua)

Dani Ramos Ojeda, Nahua, junior in Computer Science, has been a contributing member of several student organizations including Cornell University Sustainable Design, Computational Psycholinguistics, Native American Indigenous Students at Cornell, and the American Inidan Science and Engineering Society. Dani’s research revolves around language revitalization and how linguistics, machine learning, and software development intersect for machine translation of low resource languages like Nahuatl and Otomi (Hñahñu), two languages falling out of usage in her family.

 

In a Spring 2023 symposium hosted by AIISP and the Redistributive Computing Systems Group, Dani gave a presentation on Data Sovereignty and Indigenous protocol, discussing global efforts to revitalize Indigenous and low-resource languages. Dani adopted Emiliano Zapata’s research approach to the land in that: data is for those who tend to it with their own hands—essentially, a model that prescribes that data tended to by a community should be for the community.

 

Dani connected with international students and faculty to explore the process of machine translation of Nahuatl through an IOS app. Through her work she expanded her own knowledge of Nahuatl and is exploring ways to make the app more accessible to Native communities. Future research involves exploring ethical and communal corpus building for similar machine learning models.