Amata Congratulates Salamasina Fuimaono and Research Team on AI4LAM Award

Washington, D.C. - Congresswoman Uifa'atali Amata is congratulating American Samoa's Salamasina July Fuimaono and her research team on receiving the Best Research Project Award at the 2026 AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference in Washington, D.C.

Congresswoman Uifa'atali Amata welcomes Salamasina July Fuimaono of Lauli'i to her Washington, D.C., congressional office during Fuimaono's visit for the 2026 AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference

Fuimaono and fellow researchers Yangyang Chen, Rebecca Fraimow, Kyeongmin Rim, and Owen King received the recognition for their project, "Building AI Tools with Communities: Language Identification for Low-Resource Languages in Public Media Archives." Their research includes work involving the Samoan and Yup'ik languages and explores how new technology can help identify these languages within public media archives.

"Congratulations to Salamasina and her entire research team on this wonderful recognition," said Congresswoman Amata. "It is especially meaningful to see the Samoan language and our cultural heritage represented in important research involving emerging technology. It was a pleasure to welcome Salamasina to our congressional office while she was in Washington, and I wish her and the entire team continued success."

Fuimaono was born and raised in Lauli'i and graduated from Fagaitua High School. She is the daughter of Aeoainuu Aleki and Elisapeta Vaiaoga.

Fuimaono serves as Samoan Language Program Director at Saint Louis School, a lecturer at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa, and Co-Founder and Board Member of O Le Malamalama Hawai'i. Her submitted research paper confirms her affiliations with all three institutions.

Caption Award recipients are recognized during the 2026 AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference in Washington, D.C.

The research project focuses on a challenge facing public media archives. Thousands of hours of programming contain languages other than English and Spanish, but archival records do not always identify the languages being spoken. The research team is working with native and heritage speakers of Samoan and Yup'ik to help develop and evaluate tools that can identify these languages and make archival materials easier to discover.

Fuimaono presented the research with her team during the AI4LAM Fantastic Futures conference. While in Washington for the conference, she also visited Congresswoman Amata's congressional office.

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