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Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and NYU’s MOTH (More-Than-Human Life) Program Explore How Understanding Sperm Whale Communication Can be a Force for Legal Good

April 23, 2025

Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and New York University’s More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program have joined forces to explore how advances in our understanding of sperm whale communications could lead to positive legal change.

Legal & Ethical Principles for NACTs

April 2, 2025

Currently, guiding principles and ethics for the field of nonhuman animal communication technologies (NACTs) are few and far between, but Project CETI and the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program at NYU School of Law have come together to address this issue.

New Project CETI Tote!

November 27, 2024

Project CETI is thrilled to announce that Jenae Bell has been selected as the winner of CETI's Dominica Design Competition. Her artwork, inspired by the island's natural landscape and cultural traditions, will be featured on the limited edition CETI tote bag!

Project CETI Announces Eco-Fit Youth Program in Collaboration with The Ashley Lashley Foundation

October 31, 2024

Project CETI is partnering with the Ashley Lashley Foundation to bring the Eco-Fit Youth Program to Dominica! The program will take place in over 10 primary schools in Dominica in October and November.

Yanson Hilaire

New Methods for Whale Tracking and Rendezvous Using Autonomous Robots

October 30, 2024

Project CETI and Harvard have established a new reinforcement learning framework for rendezvous with whales using autonomous robots, combining sensing from diverse sensor streams.

Project CETI at Emerson Collective Climate Science Fair

September 21, 2024

On September 21st-23rd, Project CETI will be participating in the Emerson Collective Climate Science Fair on the High Line in New York City!

Project CETI has partnered with NYU School of Law’s “More Than Human Life” Project (MOTH)

August 1, 2024

Project CETI has partnered with New York University School of Law’s “More Than Human Life” Project (MOTH) for an exciting new endeavor to explore the legal opportunities and risks of AI-assisted translations of the language of whales and other species.

2024 Decoding Communication in Non-Human Species III Blog

July 15, 2024

Project CETI held the third annual Decoding Communication in Non-Human Species workshop with the Simon’s Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. This workshop brought scientists from a variety of fields to answer pivotal questions in the animal communication sphere.

D.S. & DURGA x Project CETI “LET’S DIVE”

June 8, 2024

D.S. & DURGA is collaborating with Project CETI, the ambitious nonprofit organization committed to translating the communication of sperm whales using artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art gentle robotics. Together we are launching a 50ml perfume named for a ‘common ground’ phrase between whale and human speak: LET’S DIVE!‍

Project CETI 2023 Annual Report

May 9, 2024

Project CETI is excited to announce the launch of our 2023 Annual Report! This annual report captures all of Project CETI's growth since our inception.

Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet Proposed for the First Time

May 7, 2024

Sperm whale communication exhibits structure with key similarities to aspects of human language and other primate communication systems, moving towards understanding how sperm whales transmit meaning.

Project CETI Reading List

April 23, 2024

April 23rd is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Book Day. Dedicated to amazing past and present literature and authors across the globe, this day pays tribute to them and highlights the need for access to diverse literature and authors. ‍

Project CETI Updates

April 4, 2024

CETI achieved several major milestones over the past year. We are excited to share these updates with you all and thank you for all your support!

Project CETI featured in the New Yorker

September 4, 2023

We’re thrilled to share that Project CETI is featured in The New Yorker this week in a piece authored by Elizabeth Kolbert (best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History).

CETI hosts second annual conference

August 8, 2023

In June, CETI hosted the second annual Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II conference at the University of California, Berkeley (US Berkeley) and is pleased to announce that the third annual conference will be held in June 2024 in Boston!

CETI

CETI Fellowship's First Graduation

July 10, 2023

We celebrate the graduation of the inaugural CETI Marine Conservation Fellows, achievements throughout the year, and introduction of the new cohort.

Fiona Korwin-Pawlowski, M.Sc. & Makeda Warner

In memory of Roger Payne

June 15, 2023

Roger may be best known for uncovering the features of whale songs, but in the process he also uncovered a fundamental truth about humans and our ability to amplify the magic of nature.

David Gruber & the CETI Team

Welcome to CETI’s new website!

May 9, 2023

Over the past year, the CETI team leaders and researchers took great strides towards our mission to listen to and translate whale communication. We’re excited to share our progress so far and bring everyone along on this journey with us.

David Gruber

Can AI Decode Whale Sounds? Project CETI is Here to Find Out

April 25, 2025

What if we could understand the language of another species—one with its own culture, dialects, and deep intergenerational bonds? David Gruber, founder and President of Project CETI, shares how his team is using advanced machine learning and state-of-the-art gentle robotics to translate the clicks and codas of sperm whales.

Bioneers

Whales Could One Day Defend Themselves In Court—and In Their Own Words

April 24, 2025

Scientists are closer than ever to deciphering sperm whale communication. Their breakthroughs could open the door to expanded whale rights and even legal personhood.

National Geographic

Researchers are Using AI to Understand what Animals are Saying

April 23, 2025

AI is reshaping countless aspects of life. But so far, its applications have focused mostly on our singular species, Homo sapiens. What if humans used AI to better understand the nonhuman beings with whom we share the planet?

Time

Exploring the Synergy of Art and Science: Project CETI and the Waitukubuli Artist Association

March 26, 2025

As a part of CETI ARTS, Project CETI partnered with the Waitukubuli Artist Association in Dominica to create the CETI mural and the CETI tote bag. These initiatives show the intersections between art and science!

Dominica News Online

An AI to Predict Where Sperm Whales Will Surface

January 2, 2025

Project CETI researchers from the University of Harvard have developed a framework that makes use of drones and a reinforced learning algorithm to predict where sperm whales will surface so that their conversation can be recorded.

Hello Future

How Would The World Change If We Could Understand What Sperm Whales Are Saying?

December 14, 2024

Fiona Korwin-Pawlowski, CSO of Project CETI, speaks with Parley about why she views CETI's work communicating sperm whale communication as similar to an art project, the inspiration of the late Roger Payne and why AI, if used correctly, can help us see the universe more clearly.

Parley

AI Decodes the Calls of the Wild

December 10, 2024

Artificial intelligence could reveal how animals of the land, sea and sky talk to others of their species.

Nature

Listening to the More-Than-Human World: Legal & Ethical Principles for Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies

December 6, 2024

No longer science fiction, technologies enabling communication with nonhuman animals now offer a host of opportunities — and a panoply of risks. Guardrails could help ensure responsible development.

Open Global Rights

What If We Understood What Animals Are Saying? The Legal Impact Of Ai-assisted Studies Of Animal Communication

April 23, 2025

Pioneering projects, like Project Cetacean Translation Initiative’s (CETI) work with sperm whales, are challenging long-held assumptions about animal communication and opening the door to new legal and ethical considerations. If these initiatives succeed, how might the legal terrain be reshaped?

Ecology Law Quarterly

Automatic Detection and Annotation of Eastern Caribbean Sperm Whale Codas

April 14, 2025

A key technology for sperm whale monitoring is the identification of sperm whale communication signals, known as codas. Thus, our team presents the first automatic coda detector and annotator with graph-based clustering. It utilizes the expected similarity between the clicks that make up the coda.

Scientific Reports

Evidence of social learning across symbolic cultural barriers in sperm whales

March 5, 2025

Using acoustic data from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, there is a evidence to suggest social learning in sperm whales across sociocultural boundaries.

E-Life Sciences

Bioinspired Surface Structures for Added Shear Stabilization in Suction Discs

January 6, 2025

For underwater robotics, secure and reversible adhesion is critical for fields like conservation and exploration3 , which require reliable tools for monitoring (e.g., marine animal research4,5 ) or grasping (e.g., robotic manipulation6,7 ). To address such problems, researchers often take inspiration from organisms, some of which have specialized structures that help them adhere to various substrates in unpredictable environments.

Nature Portfolio

Reinforcement Learning–Based Framework for Whale Rendezvous via Autonomous Sensing Robots

October 30, 2024

Rendezvous with sperm whales for biological observations is made challenging by their prolonged dive patterns. Here, we propose an algorithmic framework that codevelops multiagent reinforcement learning–based routing (autonomy module) and synthetic aperture radar–based very high frequency (VHF) signal–based bearing estimation (sensing module) for maximizing rendezvous opportunities of autonomous robots with sperm whales.

Science Robotics

Contextual and Combinatorial Structure in Sperm Whale Vocalisations

May 7, 2024

Sperm whales are highly social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas. These codas are more expressive and structured than previously believed, and built from a repertoire comprising nearly an order of magnitude more distinguishable codas. These results show context-sensitive and combinatorial vocalisation can appear in organisms with divergent evolutionary lineage and vocal apparatus.

Nature Communications

Follow Anything: Open-Set Detection, Tracking, and Following in Real-Time

April 4, 2024

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Stickiness in shear: Stiffness, shape, and sealing in bioinspired suction cups affect shear performance on diverse surfaces

March 26, 2024

Inspired by the diversity of multiple aquatic species, we investigated how bioinspired cups with different disc shapes performed in shear loading conditions. These experiments highlighted pertinent physical characteristics found in biological discs (regions of stiffness, flattened margins, a sealing rim), as well as ecologically relevant shearing conditions.

Bioinspiration & Biomimetics

Detecting the Presence of Sperm Whales’ Echolocation Clicks in Noisy Environments

March 24, 2024

Sperm whales navigate underwater with a series of impulsive, click-like sounds known as echolocation clicks. These clicks are characterized by a multipulse structure (MPS) that serves as a distinctive pattern. In this work, we use the stability of the MPS as a detection metric for recognizing and classifying the presence of clicks in noisy environments.

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

Studying the effect of camera tag associated white light on the diving and foraging behavior of Eastern Caribbean sperm whales

January 1, 2024

Studying the behavior of animals roaming the deep-sea is challenging and is driven by technological developments.

iScience

Vowels and Diphthongs in Sperm Whales

December 4, 2023

Sperm whale vocalizations are among the most intriguing communication systems in the animal kingdom. Traditionally, sperm whale codas, or groups of clicks, have been primarily analyzed in terms of the number of clicks and their inter-click timing.

OSF Preprints

Inter-pulse estimation for sperm whale click detection

September 21, 2023

Sperm whales are characterized by the inter-pulse interval (IPI) of their vocalization, which is a function of the whales’ size. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for detecting and extracting features from the IPI of sperm whale clicks.

IEEE

A Theory of Unsupervised Translation Motivated by Understanding Animal Communication

September 21, 2023

Recent years have seen breakthroughs in neural language models that capture nuances of language, culture, and knowledge. Neural networks are capable of translating between languages -- in some cases even between two languages where there is little or no access to parallel translations, in what is known as Unsupervised Machine Translation (UMT).

arXiv

Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference

March 20, 2023

This paper proposes a methodology for discovering meaningful properties in data by exploring the latent space of unsupervised deep generative models. We combine manipulation of individual latent variables to extreme values outside the training range with methods inspired by causal inference into an approach we call causal disentanglement with extreme values (CDEV) and show that this approach yields insights for model interpretability.

arXiv

Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales

June 17, 2022

Machine learning has been advancing dramatically over the past decade. Most strides are human-based applications due to the availability of large-scale datasets; however, opportunities are ripe to apply this technology to more deeply understand non-human communication.

iScience

Deep Machine Learning Techniques for the Detection and Classification of Sperm Whale Bioacoustics

August 29, 2019

We implemented Machine Learning (ML) techniques to advance the study of sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) bioacoustics. This entailed employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to construct an echolocation click detector designed to classify spectrograms generated from sperm whale acoustic data according to the presence or absence of a click.

Scientific Reports

Listen to the Whales!

We’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest breakthroughs and progress.

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