Can AI help human to get closer to nature ?

A scientific collaborative project on animal communication is under development and will potentially revolutionize bioacoustic domain.

This project named Earth Species Project whose goal is principally to be able to decode the language of animals has been launched in 2017. It is a non-profit organization headed by Katie Zacarian, Aza Raskin and Britt Selvitelle. Unfortunately, the human being having limits, it would be impossible for him alone to realize that task but artificial intelligence can.

To achieve this goal, the use of artificial intelligence is very helpful because of the automatic learning from this model that could be able to allow us to understand each animal’s signals and even them undetectable before by the human ear due to the too low frequencies.

A set of working tools is necessary for the development of this bioacoustic model such as voice recognition with the help of the encodeur AVES (Animal Vocalization Encoder based of Self Supervision) used with a database of audio recordings of animals sounds to be able to identify and to classify each sounds as well as a collect of data on the movements, of behavior and of the physiology of species to understand the signification of their sounds, or their language.

To give an exemple of the accuracy of their model, as part of their researches, they studied the voice signaling of beluga whales, a threatened species and as they give a cry to stay grouped, they realized measurements of these calls which allowed them to understand relationships between whales. Thanks to these tests, they were able to notice that the final analysis corresponded to the same did by experts in the domain.

A last important problem is to know if it exists a possible translation between animal and human language. Scientists has noticed that the human being language can be represented geometrically by a galaxy in multidimensional space where each point of that galaxy represents a word and its position in the space its link between other words. By that principe we can additionally notice that each galaxy corresponding to a human language has the same form. For a translation be possible, we should then have the two same forms.

Sources and additional informations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioacoustics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4OFjxQQSaI – french short podcast that introduce the topic

https://www.actuia.com/actualite/comment-earth-species-project-utilise-lia-pour-decoder-la-communication-animale/ – french article

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQFPL9JLQEY – documentary with explanations

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9SvPs1cCds – longer video on the project development made by them

https://www.earthspecies.org/faq – their website