Background

“Tohu” means both “sign, symbol, or label” and “direct or advise.” That is why Kandy Wahanui-Peters, Tohu Media co-founder, chose the name “Tohu Media” when creating what they plan to be a signature company to enable faster protection of human creativity and cultural heritage in the age of generative AI.

Tohu is creating a digital fingerprint for that content to ensure the media is identified. It is creating unique digital fingerprints through AI models identifying pieces of original content with guidance from indigenous communities to ensure its protection, authenticity and accuracy.

Opportunity

For Tohu Media, "sovereignty is important as it gives us a voice over our data." Tohu Media practices data sovereignty by ensuring everything is physically located and run from Aotearoa New Zealand in companies headquartered in Aotearoa New Zealand. This enables all the data Tohu Media processes to be protected by Aotearoa New Zealand law and ensure no Māori data would be uploaded to a non-Aotearoa New Zealand cloud provider during the identification process.

To truly achieve data sovereignty requires technology sovereignty. Kandy is adamant that iwi need to be investing in technological infrastructure to have control over data relating to their health, farming, fisheries, forestry, cultural and other commercial investments.

Therefore both data and technological sovereignty is a means for Aotearoa New Zealanders to ensure our voices can impact how our data is accessed, used and secured.

While looking for a sovereign solution, Tohu Media came across Catalyst Cloud as a New Zealand-based and owned Public Cloud Provider.

Additionally, for Tohu to run their AI models, they required a public cloud with GPU-powered machines. This would enable cost-effective and fast processing of the AI models powering the Tohu Media platform.

Solution

As Tohu Media were building their models and commercial capability, Catalyst Cloud provided Kandy and the team with a development grant to support their initial development. This helped enable Tohu Media to begin to build and test their models on Catalyst Cloud without an immediate financial burden during the early stages of the partnership. Alongside this, Tohu Media is assisted by Callaghan Innovation to develop their AI models and by Catalyst Cloud GPU specialists for onboarding and getting their system up and running.

Kandy shares that with Catalyst Cloud “I don’t have to worry about upgrading or maintaining or buying the hardware, whilst not compromising data sovereignty.”

Now Tohu Media is hosted on Catalyst Cloud, they’ve deployed numerous AI models and processed media content through those models. Next up, Tohu Media will deploy an action recognition model which they plan to launch for internal testing during the coming financial year. Beyond this, they are also building and training models focusing on Māori art recognition to help identify the provenance, access and usage of cultural heritage in content and data. All content owners are involved with these processes to ensure their tikanga Māori is applied.