Earth Species Project

So exciting to see how much interest there is in communication and language as a key unlock in resetting our relationship with the rest of nature. A fabulous piece featuring Earth Species Project in Scientific American.

Artificial Intelligence Could Finally Let Us Talk with Animals AI is poised to revolutionize our understanding of animal communication

We tell Science how the power of AI can help us understand what animals say.

Read our Perspectives piece below, co-authored with scientists from the University of St Andrews, Harvard University, and the University of Oxford.

Led by Professor Christian Rutz from the School of Biology at the University of St Andrews, our cross-disciplinary team explains how cutting-edge machine learning can provide transformative insights into the hidden lives and minds of animals, with important implications for their conservation.

Using machine learning to decode animal communication New methods promise transformative insights and conservation benefits

Are you a thought leader in AI with a track record leading a world-class research team? We're looking for a seasoned Research Director to join the Earth Species Project team and lead our long-term research agenda into the communication systems of other species. This is a rare opportunity to be on leading edge of AI research and to contribute to changing the way human beings relate to the rest of nature. Please share with your networks!

We're Hiring! Director of Research - Earth Species Project Earth Species Project is looking for a thought leader in artificial intelligence with a track record of managing a team of researchers.

“We're building on top of the research in the human domain. We're building models that work with bats, as well as with whales."

Using the same advanced AI tools that underpin and , Earth Species Project is working to unlock the secrets of animal communication. By investing in the fundamentals – benchmarks and foundation models – we are driving future progress in decoding animal communication.

Our research builds on the data and deep expertise of the biologists and conservationists we work with. “Partnerships are critical for advancing this field. We work with 40-plus biologists and institutions to gather the data,” says ESP CEO Katie Zacarian. “Then we turn it into something useful for them and us"

Together, we hope to help deliver better conservation outcomes and ultimately transform the way we relate to the world around us.

We're grateful for Google's support on our mission to provide new insights into non-human communication.

Can generative AI lead people to understand animals? | Google Cloud Blog The Earth Species Project is using large language models to develop tools to decipher animal communication.

Don't miss this fascinating conversation between Aza Raskin of Earth Species Project, Dr. Karen Bakker, and Chris Morgan on the possibilities and practicalities of using the latest technology to communicate with other species

Digital Dr. Dolittle: decoding animal conversations with artificial intelligence We could be talking to animals in the next year using AI. But are we ready?

Today, Aza Raskin shares Earth Species Project's mission to use emerging AI to communicate with other species and transform the way we perceive the world around us at the 19th European Trend Day.

Hosted by GDI Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, one of the leading European thinktanks on economic and societal issues, this event brings together industry leaders to explore how our understanding of nature and our relationship with it are changing.

This year's theme of biophilia and nature-inspired solutions aims to identify current trends and emerging opportunities to develop greener, more sustainable and inclusive scenarios for the future of all species.


https://gdi.ch/en/events/conferences/19th-european-trend-day/

Have you checked out the Earth Species Project newsletter? Out this week, be sure to catch up on our latest project updates, research highlights, and reflections on how new AI breakthroughs are transforming the way we communicate and relate to the rest of nature.

Subscribe on our website to join the Earth Species community!

https://mailchi.mp/ca09ec97ee2c/your-update-from-earth-species-project-17018991

We're excited that the work of ESP is featured in Tom Mustill's recently released book "How to Speak Whale". You can join him live next week for a Turing Lecture at The Royal Institute in London where he will do a deep dive - no pun intended - into the world of animal communication and the technological breakthroughs that give us hope for decoding animal language.

https://www.turing.ac.uk/events/turing-lectures-how-speak-whale

The Turing Lectures: How to speak whale Inside the technology that’s decoding the voices of ocean giants.

"We hypothesize that ML models can provide new insights into non-human communication, and believe that discoveries fueled by these new techniques have the potential to transform our relationship with the rest of nature"

How Artificial Intelligence Is Helping to Translate Animal Languages Researchers from the Earth Species Project are using artificial intelligence to translate how dogs bark into human speech, which could improve human translations, but experts warn there's still a long way to go.

We are happy to announce AVES, a self-supervised audio representation model for encoding animal vocalizations, aka "BERT for animals," led by ESP Senior AI Research Scientist Masato Hagiwara. AVES outperforms all the baselines, including strong neural networks trained on annotated audio classification datasets. We open source the model weights.

* Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14493
* Repo: https://github.com/earthspecies/aves

We are happy to announce BEANS (the BEnchmark of ANimal Sounds), a collection of public datasets and tasks designed to measure the performance of ML models in bioacoustics, led by Earth Species Project Senior AI Research Scientists Masato Hagiwara, Benjamin Hoffman, Jen-Yu Liu, Maddie Cusimano, Felix Effenberger, and CEO Katie Zacarian.

Read the paper here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.12300

We open source the benchmark and the code in the hope of establishing a new standard dataset for ML-based bioacoustic research. Read more at our Github: https://github.com/earthspecies/beans

Earth Species Project is growing! This is an exciting opportunity for a Senior AI Research Scientist to join our dynamic global team. We are a non-profit organization focused on applying machine learning techniques to the challenge of decoding communication of non-human species. And we are motivated by the potential to unlock a new understanding that will change how we interact with and relate to the rest of nature. If you have a background in machine learning, natural language processing and/or programming and are intrigued by an opportunity to use your skills to change the world - read on and apply soon!

https://www.earthspecies.org/jobs/jobs-senior-ai-research-scientist