The data thus collected can then be used to “train” machine-learning algorithms.Ībout two miles offshore, the captain, Kevin George, killed the engines. It also involves planting recording devices on the whales themselves-cetacean bugs, as it were. This involves installing a network of underwater microphones to capture the codas of passing whales. The group’s plan is to turn Dominica’s west coast into a giant whale-recording studio. One of these is a stretch of water off Dominica, a volcanic island in the Lesser Antilles.ĬETI has its unofficial headquarters in a rental house above Roseau, the island’s capital. ![]() But scattered around the tropics, for reasons that are probably squid-related, there are a few places the whales tend to favor. ![]() It is estimated that, in the course of a year, an individual whale swims at least twenty thousand miles. “I think it’s something that people get really excited about: Can we go from science fiction to science?” Rus told me. (The acronym is pronounced “setty,” and purposefully recalls SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.) CETI represents the most ambitious, the most technologically sophisticated, and the most well-funded effort ever made to communicate with another species. Thus was born the Cetacean Translation Initiative-Project CETI for short. Among the experts who found it loopy and, at the same time, irresistible were Robert Wood, a roboticist at Harvard, and Daniela Rus, who runs M.I.T.’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. ![]() “But David has this kind of power, this ability to convince and drag people along. “This sounded like probably the most crazy project that I had ever heard about,” Bronstein told me. Bronstein, also a computer scientist, is now the DeepMind Professor of A.I. Gruber and Goldwasser took the idea of decoding the codas to a third Radcliffe fellow, Michael Bronstein. “It was not exactly a joke, but almost like a pipe dream,” Goldwasser recollected. Perhaps, Goldwasser mused, machine learning could be used to discover the meaning of the whales’ exchanges. At the time, she was organizing a seminar on machine learning, which was advancing in ways that would eventually lead to ChatGPT. Goldwasser, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, was intrigued. One day, Gruber was sitting in his office at the Radcliffe Institute, listening to a tape of sperm whales chatting, when another fellow at the institute, Shafi Goldwasser, happened by. The exchanges seem to have the structure of conversation. Sperm whales also produce quick bursts of clicks, known as codas, which they exchange with one another. By means of a specialized organ in their heads, they generate streams of clicks that bounce off any solid (or semi-solid) object. To find their prey-generally squid-in the darkness of the depths, they rely on echolocation. The world’s largest predators, sperm whales spend most of their lives hunting. This piqued Gruber’s curiosity, so he started reading up on the animals. While there, he came across a book by a free diver who had taken a plunge with some sperm whales. In 2017, Gruber received a fellowship to spend a year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “I wanted to know: Is there a way where robots and people can be brought together that builds empathy?” he told me. Gruber enlisted another set of collaborators to develop robots that could handle jellyfish with jellyfish-like delicacy. This led him to wonder about the way that jellyfish experience the world. (Sharks see only in blue and green fluorescence, it turns out, shows up to them as greater contrast.) Meanwhile, he was also studying creatures known as comb jellies at the Mystic Aquarium, in Connecticut, trying to determine how, exactly, they manufacture the molecules that make them glow. What would a fluorescent shark look like to another fluorescent shark? Gruber enlisted researchers in optics to help him construct a special “shark’s eye” camera. ![]() While working in the Solomon Islands, northeast of Australia, Gruber discovered dozens of species of fluorescent fish, including a fluorescent shark, which opened up new questions.
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