Do you want to talk to dolphins? Researchers received the $100,000 AI Award for studying mouth hist
If Dolphins are reading this: Hello!
A team of scientists studying the Florida dolphin community It was awarded The first $100,000 Colla Doritle Challenge Award, Awarded for research into interspecies communication algorithms.
A US-based team led by Laela Sayigh Woods Hole Marine Facilitiesdiscovered that the type of whistle adopted by dolphins is used as an alarm. Another mouth they studied is used by dolphins to deal with unexpected or unfamiliar situations. The team performed the study using a non-invasive hydrophone. This provides evidence that dolphins may be using word-like whistles shared with multiple members of the community.
Capturing sounds is just the beginning. Researchers continue to decipher whistles using AI to try to find more patterns.
“The main thing that stops us from cracking the codes of animal communication is the lack of data. Think about the trillion words needed to train a large-scale language model like ChatGpt. There’s nothing like this in other animals.”
“That’s why we need programs like the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which has been building an extraordinary library for dolphin whistles for over 40 years. The cumulative result of all of that is that Laela Sayigh and her team can use deep learning to analyze whistles.
The award was part of a ceremony celebrating the work of four teams around the world. In addition to the dolphin project, researchers have studied how nightingales, malmoset monkeys and squids communicate.
The challenge is a collaboration between the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University. Submit next year Open in August.
Dolphins are just the beginning
It’s nothing new to study animals and try to learn the secrets of their communication. However, AI is accelerating the creation of larger lager datasets.
“Breakthroughs are inevitable,” says CEO and co-founder Kate Zacharyan. Earth Species Projecta California-based nonprofit organization is also working to break down language barriers with the animal world.
“Just as AI has revolutionized the fields of medicine and material science, we see similar opportunities to bring those advances to the research of animal communication and empower researchers in this field with a whole new capacity,” Zacharyan said.
Zakarian praised the rhino team and their victory, saying it would help bring about broader awareness in the study of non-human animal communication. It also allows us to focus more attention on the ways in which AI changes the nature of this type of research.
“AI systems aren’t just faster, they allow for a whole new type of inquiry,” she said. “We are moving from decoding isolated signals to exploring communication as a rich, dynamic, structural phenomenon. This is too large for the human brain, but it is possible with large AI models.”
Earth Species recently released a large open source audio language model for analyzing animal sounds Naturelm-Audio. The organization is currently working with biologists and ethologists to study species including carrion crows, orcas and jump spiders, and plans to release some of its findings later this year.