Thursday, Sept. 11, 2025

Workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species

This July, the Simons Institute co-hosted, in collaboration with Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and Oceankind, the fourth annual workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species.

Advances in machine learning have opened up possibilities for unprecedented insights into animal and plant communication. This series of workshops (beginning in 2020) brings together researchers in machine learning, signal processing, data science, linguistics, robotics, and bioacoustics to explore the challenges and current state of the art in the study of nonhuman species communication. The workshop organizers, Shafi Goldwasser, Michael Bronstein, and David Gruber, were inspired by the 1956 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, considered to be the founding event of the field.

This year’s two-day workshop included talks on communication by dolphins (here and here), birds, and sperm whales, as well as a range of talks about various aspects of human language and translation methods, bioacoustic monitoring, and machine learning for ecosystem conservation, to name just a few of the topics covered. Speakers included Tom Denton (DeepMind), Markus Freitag (Google), Tim Gardner (University of Oregon), Mark Hamilton (MIT), Lauren Harrell (Google), Denise Herzing (Wild Dolphin Project), Adam Kalai (OpenAI), Orr Paradise (UC Berkeley), David Peterson (freelance language creator), Jessie Peterson (freelance language creator), Hadar Shemtov (Google), Thad E. Starner (Georgia Tech and Google Research), Rich Williams (Coral Gardeners), and Yossi Yovel (Tel Aviv University).

In the SimonsTV corner of this issue of the newsletter, we’re featuring two highlights of the workshop: Markus Freitag on Machine Translation of Human Languages in the Age of LLMs, and Adam Kalai on Validation by Listening.

Project CETI is a large-scale, interdisciplinary scientific and conservation organization that is applying advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art robotics to listen to and translate the communication of sperm whales in Dominica. Oceankind’s mission is to improve the health of global ocean ecosystems while supporting the livelihoods of people who rely on them. Oceankind seeks to advance the policy, science, and technology necessary to reverse the growing threats facing our oceans.

PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS
Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species I (2020)
Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II (2023)
Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species III (2024)