From April 7th to 12th, 2025, I had the pleasure of visiting Kuching, Sarawak, alongside my colleague Lea Krause and Master’s student Eva Heemskerk from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. This visit, made possible through our long-standing collaboration with UNIMAS, was a vibrant mix of education, cultural exchange, and engaging discussions on the future of AI in society. dr. Cheah Wai Shiang, Associate Professor at UNIMAS was again our main point of contact for engaging with various communities.

We kicked off our trip at SMK Agama Tun Ahmad Zaidi, where Lea introduced Form 3 students to the fascinating world of Natural Language Processing and Large Language Models using Hugging Face tools. The students experimented with sentiment analysis and chatbots—many for the first time.

Later that day, I delivered a lecture at UNIMAS on “Knowledge Graphs for Cultural AI,” emphasizing how cultural context can shape ethical and inclusive AI systems. During the trip, we also managed to do some data gathering about colonial cultural heritage, by presenting participants with objects from the Sarawak region and asking their perspective on objects. This is done in the context of our HAICu project.

At Sarawak Skills, I presented on embedding AI into technical and vocational education, followed by a thoughtful roundtable on how educators can guide students to use (Hybrid) AI critically.

On our final day, we visited SK Muhibbah, a rural primary school, where we shared stories about the Netherlands and engaged with young students whose curiosity and enthusiasm reminded us of AI’s potential to reach and inspire across all communities.

That afternoon, we also met with the minister of Education and the director of the new Sarawak AI institute to explore possible cooperation between VU, UNIMAS and the institute.

This visit was a truly enriching experience, made possible by the ERASMUS+ funding scheme. We very much look forward to deepening our collaborations in the region.