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Webinar 8: Patient and Practitioner Empowerment Through AI
The MĀPUNA LAB is a place of respite for those experiencing colonial trauma. Our work is naʻau centered and focused on health and healing. Guided by ʻōhiʻa lehua as our teacher, an endemic Hawaiian tree, we work in reciprocity and partnership in healing the chronic and existential pain of historical and intergenerational trauma with our Pacific Islander brothers and sisters.
John Ano is a native Hawaiian IT systems engineer and software developer with four decades of experience in the tech industry. His formal education is in Psychology and Cognitive Science with an emphasis in how humans process information. Additionally, he studied neuroanatomy and neurophysiology to better understand how the brain processes information at various scales.
He is a Microsoft alum and currently contracts with the hardware division (Surface) on IT infrastructure and AI integration. For the past 4 years he has been actively studying neural networks and machine learning with a focus on text-to-speech (TTS) and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. His current research and interests in ML/AI relate to continuous learning, engram formation and persistence, and the phenomenon of catastrophic memory loss in overtraining scenarios.
Kākuhihewa is the 15th aliʻi ‘aimoku (ruling chief) of O‘ahu famously named in the mele “Kaulana Nā Pua.” Kākuhihewa was a kind and friendly chief who was born in Kūkaniloko and raised in the ‘Ewa moku. His primary endeavor was farming, and it is said that his abundant harvests on O‘ahu could be smelled from Kaua‘i.
Today, there is a state office building named after him in Kapolei.
