Project CETI is a nonprofit organization applying machine learning and robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales in Dominica.
#ProjectCETI
Thank you to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
@elizkolbert
and
@NewYorker
for featuring us! Read the article & learn how we’re translating whale communication & get a first look at an unexpected event we witnessed this summer: a sperm whale birth!
“Digital bioacoustics, combined with artificial intelligence, is like a planetary-scale hearing aid that enables us to listen anew with both our prosthetically enhanced ears and our imagination”
#ProjectCETI
is a non-profit organization bringing together leading cryptographers, roboticists, linguists, AI experts, technologists and marine biologists that aims to apply machine learning & robotics to listen to and translate the communication of whales. 📷: Amanda Cotton
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the development of artificial intelligence could bring happiness not only to humans but also to animals around the world?
We support their activities!
@ProjectCETI
Cogecoin Save the World's Animals...🐶🐳
Yesterday the Government of Dominica announced Dominica’s first ever sperm whale reserve! This reserve is a monumental step towards even better protecting the Dominican sperm whales and implementing regulations to ensure gentle interactions between humans and the whales.
A must read article by
@DrKarenBakker
in
@NoemaMag
- “The world resonates with nature’s sounds, which human ears cannot detect. But our computers can.”
A heartfelt & critical message from our cherished principal advisor Roger Payne in
@time
: . In the 1970s, Roger and his colleagues discovered that whales sing to one another. This remarkable discovery sparked the Save the Whales movement.
Lecture videos from our workshop 𝔻𝕖𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕟𝕘 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕚𝕟 ℕ𝕠𝕟𝕙𝕦𝕞𝕒𝕟 𝕊𝕡𝕖𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝕀𝕀 are now available here: . We co-hosted this workshop with the
@UCBerkeley
@SimonsInstitute
& Oceankind in June.
Thank you
@AWS_Nonprofits
for naming us a winner of the 2021 Amazon Web Services Imagine Grant for Nonprofits in the Go Further, Faster category which recognizes organizations using technology to solve the world’s biggest challenges!
Have you seen our latest findings? Check out all of CETI’s preprints and peer reviewed publications including our roadmap paper that outlines how we’re listening to and translating sperm whale communication on our website here:
✨Please meet Whitney, Omari and Khade, the 2022/2023 CETI Fellows!✨ CETI's Dominica Marine Conservation Fellowship is a community-based 10-month, multi-module training program for the next generation of conservation leaders in Dominica.
We would like to highlight the Dolphin Embassy, a spectacular 1970’s theoretical research project which sought to establish trans-species diplomacy, through the construction of a floating research station designed to facilitate collaboration between humans and dolphins.
The last scientific record of a sperm whale birth was 1986, without audio or video. New recordings of the whales’ behavior during the birth will give researchers new insights
Did you know that Cetaceans, which includes dolphins, porpoises and whales, have astounding specialized adaptations to their senses that allow them to thrive in aquatic environments?🐋🔊🐬
Thank you
@therobotreport
and Brianna Wessling for featuring us in the new article: “Project CETI develops robotics to make sperm whale tagging more humane.”🤖🐋
Interested in how we are listening to and translating what sperm whales are saying? See our roadmap paper & be sure to check out our other publications on our website!
Please meet Tracey, Yanson, Adeola and Kodie, the 2023/2024 CETI fellows! CETI’s Fellowship is a community-based 10-month, multi-module training program, developed with
@InsideNatGeo
, for the next generation of conservation leaders in Dominica.
Have you heard of the Save The Whales Movement? Even world renowned ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov was involved!🐋The Save The Whales Movement of the 1970s was a global effort to end commercial whaling that led to the passing of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972!
“Follow Anything” is an open-set multimodal zero-shot robotic system to detect, track and follow any object –including whales– in real time!
To learn more about the “Follow Anything” system check out the paper at the link in our bio, and watch the explainer video on youtube!
We have a new website! 🐳 Please check it out and watch our
@TEDTalks
talk, meet our team and partners, read our roadmap paper, track our progress on our blog & get involved by signing up for our newsletter, donating or coding with us on our Github!
The application for the CETI 2023/2024
#Dominica
Marine Conservation Fellowship is now open!🇩🇲 The fellowship is a 10-month, multi-module training program with a custom curriculum co-created by CETI and the National Geographic Society.
Happy
#GivingTuesday
! Today, celebrating a world built on shared humanity and radical generosity, we ask that you consider supporting Project CETI in our mission to translate what whales are saying as a means to better protect and conserve them!
Listen to Adeola, a CETI Marine Conservation Fellow, in our
#EarthMonth
series, share about her magical first scuba diving experience and how her experience growing up around the water inspired her to pursue the CETI fellowship program!
Happy
#WorldAnimalDay
! 🐳🌎
Today and every day we are honoring the animal that we’re lucky enough to study; the sperm whale! Check out how we’re listening and learning from these amazing creatures:
We have been enjoying watching huge pods of whales swim near Necker in recent weeks and it’s tragic to see them go from frolicking in the sea together to stranded on a beach:
CETI is so excited to announce our feature in the new LAS Art Foundation’s book Interspecies Future: A Primer!
The book is available for pre-order now at the link in our bio!
Did you know that CETI’s Robotics Lead Robert Wood, CETI’s Robotics Program Manager at Harvard Daniel Vogt, Nina Sinata, and our Founder,
@davidfgruber
, developed the first ultra soft underwater gripper, able to harmlessly grasp delicate marine life such as jellyfish?
The program’s curriculum (co-created with
@InsideNatGeo
) includes modules on marine biology, scientific research and techniques, whale and wildlife monitoring, ocean navigation and sailing skills, climate change, storytelling, community outreach and leadership among other topics.
We’re honored to have our 2022/2023 CETI Marine Conservation Fellows, Whitney, Omari and Khade, and our fellowship Program Manager Makeda Warner, featured in our
@InsideNatGeo
partner
@NG_PristineSeas
’ documentary about
#Dominica
!
Project CETI was selected as an Audacious Project in 2020, and Virgin Unite is proud to support it.
@ElizKolbert
wrote for
@NewYorker
about how Project CETI came to be and the work it is doing to translate whale communication
@ProjectCETI
@TheAudaciousPrj
What if we could understand a non-human species and use the power of collaborative research to build a more sustainable future? Sperm whales have a complex communication system and live in tight-knit family groups.
Please join us in celebrating the graduation of the first cohort of CETI Fellows; Khade, Omari and Whitney! CETI’s Dominica Marine Conservation Fellowship is a community-based 10-month, multi-module training program for the next generation of conservation leaders in
#Dominica
.🇩🇲
Anybody else need a power nap? Sperm Whales completely understand this impulse and they actually take 10-15 minute power naps periodically throughout their day in between their deep foraging dives!
We’re saddened to have lost our friend and colleague, the late
@DrKarenBakker
, this past June. Karen was an exceptional author and an award winning researcher of digital innovation & environmental governance. We were grateful to be in her brilliant book,The Sounds of Life.🧵
Do whales have accents? Project CETI – an Audacious Project that Virgin Unite has supported – worked with TED-Ed to create this video exploring this, among other questions about how whales communicate
@ProjectCETI
@TheAudaciousPrj
Happy
#WorldBookDay
!📚🤓🐳Today we wanted to highlight four of our favorite books about whales, cetacean life, interspecies communication and collaboration, and generally about a future beyond the Anthropocene!
A beautiful read on how
@ProjectCETI
is harnessing AI to build communications channels with other species. Proud to support their work through
@VirginUnite
:
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (
@alexispauline
), is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species, based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals.
Listen to
@tommustill
, author of the insightful book How to Speak Whale, and Professor Michael Wooldridge, in the
@ri_science
2023 Christmas Lectures about Artificial Intelligence, discuss how CETI utilizes AI to find patterns within and decipher sperm whale communication.
They show that coda types are not arbitrary but that they form a combinatorial coding system, which gives rise to a large inventory of distinguishable codas which lay the framework for creating a sperm whale phonetic alphabet, and ultimately translating sperm whale communication
You can now dive into our 2023 Annual Report!✨🤿
Click the link below to explore how we stayed true to our mission of listening to -and translating- what sperm whales are saying.
Special thanks to our partners
@insidenatgeo
and
@theaudaciousprj
!
For the final part of our
#EarthMonth
series, listen to CETI Marine Conservation Fellow Kodie discuss how his first time scuba diving changed his perspective and made him recognize the natural beauty that the water and underwater life has to offer!🐠🪸
🌸 In honor of ≋W≋o≋r≋l≋d≋ ≋O≋c≋e≋a≋n≋ ≋M≋o≋n≋t≋h≋ we teamed up with designer Vanna Youngstein to create an exclusive limited edition 𝔏𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫 𝔱𝔬 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔥𝔞𝔩𝔢𝔰 tee available now: !🐋💕
CETI’s lead in underwater acoustics Prof. Roee Diamant and Guy Gubnitsky in their research paper: Inter-pulse Estimation for Sperm Whale Click Detection, outline a new methodology for detecting and extracting features from the Inter-pulse interval of sperm whale clicks.
Groups also share their own distinct dialects, called codas, which are unique culturally transmitted sequences of morse code-like clicks which are used as symbolic markers of social groups amongst the whales.
Did you know that besides eating copious amounts of squid, sperm whales also eat bioluminescent pyrosomes?🦑🐳
Check out the video below to see their bioluminescence in action, taken by CETI founder
@davidfgruber
!💡
This revolutionary paper shows that sperm whale communication, known as codas, exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure, revealing sophisticated structures akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species.
To learn more about how using machine learning tools to translate animal communication may be feasible, check out their paper here:
#machinelearning
#spermwhales
#CETI
Happy
#worldwildlifeday
!🦎🐠🐳🪲 Jeanelle Brisbane (
@jlkbrisbane
) a Dominican ecologist, conservationist and
@insidenatgeo
Explorer, shares how her wildlife conservation work has brought her closer to herself.
🌸 ≋H≋a≋p≋p≋y≋ ≋W≋o≋r≋l≋d≋ ≋O≋c≋e≋a≋n≋ ≋M≋o≋n≋t≋h≋! To celebrate we’ve teamed up with Vanna Youngstein to create an exclusive limited edition 𝔏𝔦𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔫 𝔱𝔬 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔴𝔥𝔞𝔩𝔢𝔰 tee available now: !🐋💕
CETI is committed to gentle research techniques through our use of gentle robotics such as bio-inspired tags, swimming robots, underwater microphones and aerial drones in our interactions with the sperm whales. Stay tuned for more updates as our technologies develop.
The event explored the challenges and current state-of-the-art approaches in the study of nonhuman species communication as well as disciplines and technologies that are likely to provide solutions to these challenges.
Speakers shared recent Natural Language Processing findings including research being conducted with whales, dolphins, cheetahs and elephants, among other species.
Oh, how we love
#Dominica
and their incredible population of sperm whales! 🐋 Our friends at
@ProjectCETI
are learning many wonderful things about these whales, including that their communications are more sophisticated than we previously knew.
The program includes modules on marine science, scientific research/techniques, water and vessel skills and storytelling and leadership among other topics. Fellows are also able to participate in our at-sea research in Dominica and various other opportunities.🐳
@ShafiGoldwasser
lead of CETI’s theory team;
@orrrrp
&
@adamfungi
, theoretical analysts on CETI’s theory team & CETI Founder
@davidfgruber
; discovered that due to the complexity of animal communication, unsupervised machine translation could function to translate it!
Happy
#WorldFisheriesDay
!🐟🦞🐳 In honor of today, we’d like to highlight Zethra Baron, Fisheries officer in the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Blue and Green Economy and our CETI Fisheries Liasion in Dominica.
We’re harnessing the power of AI, data science, linguistics, and robotics to listen to and translate how these majestic creatures communicate. Learn more:
@InsideNatGeo
@NatGeo
@CraigAWelch
This revolutionary paper shows that sperm whale communication, known as codas, exhibit contextual and combinatorial structure, revealing sophisticated structures akin to human phonetics and communication systems in other animal species.
Highly interdisciplinary research initiatives that draw on tools and perspectives from mathematics, the arts, and the natural sciences and seek to answer fundamental questions about what it means to be human sounds to good to be true.
@ProjectCETI
is doing some awesome stuff.
Happy
#EarthMonth
! 🌎⛰️🌳🌊 With over 70% of Earth's surface being covered in water, this month we’re excited to share a series featuring the CETI Marine Conservation Fellows sharing their first experiences in the water!
This approach was developed by CETI robotics and machine learning team members from
@MIT_CSAIL
: Alaa Maalouf,
Krishna Murthy Jatavallabhula, Makram Chahine, Antonio Torralba and Daniela Rus and
@hseas
: Daniel Vogt, Robert Wood, and. Ninad Jadhav.
#CETI
@ieeeorg
#robotics
To read more about the development and testing of the durability of these bioinspired suction cups, read the paper on our website at the link in our bio!
📸: Jessica Sandoval
@hseas
(The suction disc of a Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker)
#CETI
#gentlerobotics
#bioinspired
#spermwhale