Machine Learning As Animal Translators

Hidden in this everyday exchange is a wealth of social information, Dr. Barker and her colleagues discovered when they used machine-learning algorithms to analyze 36,000 soft chirps recorded in seven mole rat colonies.

Not only did each mole rat have its own vocal signature, but each colony had its own distinct dialect, which was passed down, culturally, over generations. During times of social instability — as in the weeks after a colony’s queen was violently deposed — these cohesive dialects fell apart. When a new queen began her reign, a new dialect appeared to take hold.

“The greeting call, which I thought was going to be pretty basic, turned out to be incredibly complicated,” said Dr. Barker, who is now studying the many other sounds the rodents make. “Machine-learning kind of transformed my research.”

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In recent years, scientists have begun deploying this technology to decode animal communication, using machine-learning algorithms to identify when squeaking mice are stressed or why fruit bats are shouting. Even more ambitious projects are underway — to create a comprehensive catalog of crow calls, map the syntax of sperm whales and even to build technologies that allow humans to talk back.

“Let’s try to find a Google Translate for animals,” said Diana Reiss, an expert on dolphin cognition and communication at Hunter College and co-founder of Interspecies Internet, a think tank devoted to facilitating cross-species communication.

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Other major projects are underway. Project CETI — short for the Cetacean Translation Initiative — is bringing together machine-learning experts, marine biologists, roboticists, linguists and cryptographers, among others, at more than a dozen institutions to decode the communication of sperm whales, which emit bursts of clicks that are organized into Morse code-like sequences called codas.

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This would make E.O.Wilson smile. 

A rare moment, I salute these humans in my field. 

Imagine. 

• When under taking the euphemism for barbarism called BBQ on Independence day
• When families sharing the dead body of a Turkey on Thanks Giving day,
• When feasting on the roasted dead body of an intelligent creature pig (or depending on your "culture" you might prefer fish corpse.)
• Well, when eating your daily diet of dead bodies in the name of protein

When machine learning models could translate the cries of animals in the factory farms; would you still delude yourself that you are innocent and better than Nazis?