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Dolphin researchers win $100,000 AI award to learn their whistle

If any dolphins are reading this: Hello! A team of scientists studying the Florida dolphin community has received the first $100,000 Coller Dolittle Challenge Award, which is intended to award research on interracial communication algorithm research. The team used non-invasive water pipes for the study, which provided some evidence that dolphins might use whistles such as words and share them with multiple members of their community.

According to a U.S. team led by Laela Sayigh of Woods Hall Oceanography, a whistling dolphin is used as an alarm. The Dolphin uses another whistle team to deal with unexpected or strange situations. Capturing sound is just the beginning. Researchers will use AI to continue decrypting the whistle in an attempt to find more patterns.

“The main purpose of stopping us from cracking animal transmission codes is the lack of data. Think of the 1 trillion words required to train large language models like ChatGPT. We don’t have anything like that for other animals,” said Jonathan Birch, a professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

“That’s why we need programs like the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which has built an extraordinary library of dolphin whistles over 40 years. The cumulative result of all the work is that Laela Sayigh and her team can now use in-depth learning to analyze the whistle, and maybe one day, one day, crack the code.”

The award is part of the award ceremony and is intended to recognize the work of four teams from around the world. In addition to the dolphin project, researchers also studied the ways in which nightingales, moored monkeys and cuttlefish communicate. The challenge is a collaboration between the Jeremy Kohler Foundation and Tel Aviv University. Submissions will be open in August next year.

Dolphin language just begins

It’s not new to studying animals and trying to learn the secrets of communication, but AI is accelerating the creation of increasingly larger data sets. “Breakthroughs are inevitable,” said Kate Zacarian, CEO and co-founder of the Earth Species Project, a California-based nonprofit, who can also break language barriers with the animal world.

“Just as AI has revolutionized the fields of medicine and materials science, we have seen similar opportunities to bring these advances into the research of animal transmission and empower researchers in the field with entirely new capabilities,” she said.

Zacarian praised Sayigh’s team and their victory and said it would help give broader recognition to research on non-human animal transmission. It can also focus more on the way AI can change the nature of such research.
“AI systems are not only faster. They allow entirely new types of inquiry,” she said. “We are transitioning from decoding isolated signals to exploring as a communication of rich, dynamic and structural phenomena, a task that is too big for our human brain, but may be possible for large AI models.”

The Earth Species Project recently released an open source large audio language model for analyzing animal sounds called Naturelm Audio. The organization is now working with biologists and ethicists to study species including orcas, carrion crows, jumping spiders, and more. Zacharyan said it plans to release some of their findings later this year.



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