A nonprofit research lab is getting attention from some wealthy tech philanthropists. The Earth Species Project hopes to decode other creatures’ communications with its pioneering artificial intelligence tools. Director of Impact Jane Lawton says the goal is not to build a “translator that will allow us to speak to other species.
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The Earth Species Project hopes to decode other creatures’ communications with its pioneering artificial intelligence tools. The goal is not to build a “translator that will allow us to speak to other species,” Director of Impact Jane Lawton said. However, she added, “rudimentary dictionaries” for other animals are not only possible but could help craft better conservation strategies and reconnect humanity with often forgotten ecosystems.
In Canada’s St. Lawrence River, where shipping traffic imperils the marine mammals who feed there, the group’s scientists are exploring whether machine learning can categorize unlabeled calls from the remaining belugas. Perhaps, Lawton suggested, authorities could alert nearby vessels if they understood that certain sounds signaled the whales were about to surface.
“This is not a silver bullet,” he said. “But it’s certainly part of a suite of things that can help transform how we view ourselves in relation to nature.”Gail Patricelli -- an unaffiliated animal behavior professor at the University of California, Davis -- remembers when such tools were just “pie in the sky.” Researchers previously spent months laboring to manually comb through terabytes of recordings and annotate calls.
“There’s a lot to learn and it’s very expensive,” she said. “That might not be a big deal to some of these donors but it’s very hard to come up with the money to do this.”. But ESP is trying to be “species agnostic,” AI Research Director Olivier Pietquin said, to provide tools that can sort out many animals’ speech patterns.
Zebra finches are highly social animals with large call repertoires. Whether congregating in pairs or by the hundreds, they produce hours of data — a help to the nonprofit’s AI scientists given that animal sounds aren’t as abundant as the pages of internet text scraped to train chatbots.
Laurene Powell Jobs Jane Lawton Environmental Conservation Artificial Intelligence Science Gail Patricelli Jared Blumenfeld Logan James Technology Olivier Pietquin Reid Hoffman Business
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