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Keep up with the latest in Project CETI and hear directly from our team.

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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

Project CETI captures birth of sperm whale in Dominica’s waters

September 7, 2023

The nonprofit organization Project CETI, along with its local charitable organization Project CETI Dominica, has documented an extraordinary event in Dominica’s waters: the birth of a sperm whale.

Dominica News Online

Can we talk to whales?

September 4, 2023

Researchers believe that artificial intelligence may allow us to speak to other species.

The New Yorker

Can We Decipher a Whale's First Sounds?

September 4, 2023

The scientist David Gruber explains the mission of Project CETI, and what his team has learned about how whales communicate.

The New Yorker

This video captures a rarely seen sperm whale birth. It’s beautiful.

August 31, 2023

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 insight.

National Geographic

Google Translate for whales? How AI is being used to speak with animals

June 15, 2023

A new wave of researchers are using machine learning to understand animals on their own terms

Dazed

How Humans Are Learning to Speak Whale

June 6, 2023

Humans, who have long dreamed of interspecies communication, are now working to decode the calls of two whale species. But our efforts to understand our underwater neighbors require more than just scientific investment—they take real empathy.

Atmos

I Spent My Life Saving the Whales. Now They Might Save Us

June 5, 2023

More than fifty years ago, my team and I first discovered that whales sing to each other

Time

How Scientists Are Using AI Tech To Communicate With Animals

May 21, 2023

On the "In Real Life" season finale, Sam Eaton examines how AI technology is opening up new possibilities for scientists communicating with animals — from sending messages to elephants on the plains of Kenya to mimicking honey bees in Germany and bat sounds in Israel.

Scripps News

Can Understanding Whale Speech Help Us Talk to Aliens?

May 13, 2023

Biologist David Gruber thinks decoding the language of whales could be just the first step in understanding what other lifeforms are saying—in this world and out of it.

Daily Beast

Twenty youths complete training in National Geographic Photo Camp

April 11, 2023

Twenty youths from across Dominica have now honed their skills in photography after participating in a four-day photo camp organized by the National Geographic Explorers in partnership with the locally-based Project Cetacean Translation Initiative (CETI).

Dominica News Online

Could Chat GPT Talk to Whales?

March 18, 2023

The sound of sperm whales. Its a sound that haunted sailors for centuries.

Real Science

Who Speaks for the Oceans?

September 1, 2022

Few people are better qualified to answer the question “Who Speaks for the Oceans?” than David Gruber, a marine biologist and whale whisperer who founded Project ceti—the Cetacean Translation Initiative.

The New Yorker

The Animal Translators

August 30, 2022

Scientists are using machine learning to eavesdrop on naked mole rats, fruit bats, crows and whales — and to communicate back.

New York Times

A race to converse with, and save, the ocean’s brainiest eco-predators

July 14, 2022

In the 2016 sci-fi movie “Arrival,” a linguist and a theoretical physicist race against time to communicate with endangered extraterrestrial heptapods wishing to share their wisdom and technologies with the human race so it will survive and one day return the favor.

University of California

AI Might Help Us Decode Whale Language

January 27, 2022

Scientists are wielding algorithms in hopes of understanding how the mighty mammals communicate.

Discover Magazine

If we could talk to the animals … whales, specifically

November 5, 2021

Scientists who met at Radcliffe are exploring how whales communicate, and if they have language

The Harvard Gazette

Could We Chat With Whales?

October 28, 2021

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them

Smithsonian Magazine

Are We on the Verge of Chatting with Whales?

October 26, 2021

An ambitious project is attempting to interpret sperm whale clicks with artificial intelligence, then talk back to them.

Hakai Magazine

Whale Hello There: NVIDIA Intern Part of Team Working to Understand, Communicate with Whales

September 15, 2021

Imagine trying to make contact with super-intelligent beings. Now imagine they’re not from space. Sperm whales, the largest of the toothed whales, boast enormous brains, explains David Gruber, a professor of biology and environmental science at the City University of New York.

NVIDIA

Researchers Use Artificial Intelligence to Translate Whale Talk

April 20, 2021

To understand the “clicks” sperm whales make to talk (stringing together a series of statements called “codas”), researchers have launched a five-year-long quest called Protect CETI.

Cool Hunting Daily

Scientists Are Using AI to Try to Talk with Whales

April 19, 2021

A team of researchers at Project CETI (the Cetacean Translation Initiative) are launching what they say will be the largest “interspecies communication” project ever. The target species? Sperm whales.

Nerdist

Groundbreaking effort launched to decode whale language

April 19, 2021

On a crisp spring morning in 2008, Shane Gero overheard a pair of whales having a chat. Gero, a Canadian biologist, had been tracking sperm whales off the Caribbean island nation of Dominica when two males, babies from the same family, popped up not far from his boat.

National Geographic

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

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

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

A Theory of Unsupervised Translation Motivated by Understanding Animal Communication

November 20, 2022

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

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

Listen to the Whales!

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

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