Long before Dr. Josiah Hester became a tenure track professor in Northwestern University’s Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science, his parents taught him to understand the connection between computing and a secure life. “My parents saw that computing generally is your ticket,” says Dr. Hester, Native Hawaiian (Kānaka maoli), who remembers how his mom and dad started him learning the Java programing language.
It was a good fit for Dr. Hester because it meshed with his love of building real-world things, like tree forts and Lego constructions — Java just opened possibilities to create in the virtual world. But his parents saw it as a skill that was even more important. “This could lead to a good job so you’ll be secure,” says Dr. Hester, “which is really important because we came from insecurity.”
Indeed, Dr. Hester’s family story includes its share of deprivation and challenges. His grandmother grew up in Hawaii as the second-oldest child in a family of seven kids. “They were living in poverty, like so many Hawaiians at the time because of cultural and societal repression soon after statehood; it was difficult to get food,” says Dr. Hester. “She felt responsible for all the kids and said she needed to find a new life.” His grandmother stepped into that new life when she married a sailor after his stint at Pearl Harbor, then moved to North Carolina, where he was from.”
North Carolina was where Dr. Hester’s mom was born and, ultimately, began to raise her own family, including Josiah. Eventually, Dr. Hester’s parents moved the family back to Hawaii, where he graduated from Hawaii Baptist Academy before returning to the East Coast to earn a BS and PhD in computer science at Clemson University.
At Clemson Dr. Hester found the direction that now focuses his research: smart, sustainable, mobile computing. “My advisor, Jacob Sorber, introduced me to this postage stamp–sized computer. I had never seen anything like it; he called it a ‘mote,’ a wireless computer with sensors onboard to understand the physical world,” Dr. Hester recalls. “Jacob and I started thinking about these smart devices. They are all constrained by batteries, which eventually die, even rechargeables, and that are made with lithium extracted using water-intensive mining practices in lands Native people own, who suffer from water insecurity. Worse, these batteries eventually get burned in the atmosphere in the recycling process.”
Dr. Hester rejected the idea that the only way to benefit from computing is by compromising the planet. “Why not have both [smart and green]?” he asks. Which is how Dr. Hester began building devices that don’t need batteries because they get their power from the sun, motion, radio waves, even microbes in the soil. Then there are his face masks that harvest energy from breathing and his battery-free portable gaming devices. Dr. Hester’s devices are aimed at motivating radical technological approaches to address climate change and inspiring people with new ideas to increase environmental quality as well as promoting better human health.
Dr. Hester also spends a lot of time ensuring that these sustainable devices get into the hands of Indigenous students and help them build the coding and computer skills that have been such an important part of his own success. Dr. Hester works with Pū'ōhala Elementary School, a bilingual public school that teaches in English and 'Ōlelo Hawai'i (Native Hawaiian), to introduce computing education informed by cultural norms related to sustainability. One program Dr. Hester works on supplies students with smart devices that gather air and water quality data at Waikalua Loko i'a, a 400-year-old fishpond built by Dr. Hester’s ancestors in Kāne'ohe Hawaii. These fishponds are significant cultural sites for Native Hawaiians.
The connection between computing and sustainability and conservation is one that Dr. Hester believes is obvious to all Native Hawaiians. “If someone else was Native Hawaiian and became a computer engineer, they would have done the same thing,” he says. “I am the first to become a tenure track professor in computing. But I won’t be the last.”
On a bigger-picture level, Dr. Hester wants his work to help drive a change across the world in which the systems societies rely on — for everything from computing to food to energy — are all sustainable. “People think that sustainability is on me as an individual. That won’t work. We have to rethink entire systems and societal structures such as computing infrastructure and application to become sustainable,” he says. “That comes from an Indigenous mindset where land and people are connected. It’s systemic.”
