Marius Miron: Animal Language Processing: AI to decode communication beyond humans

Abstract AI already supports conservation at a remarkable scale. Audio and video monitoring now generate petabytes of data for biodiversity monitoring and ecological research. These systems primarily detect and classify, they can tell us if a species is present or absent. But what if we could move beyond detecting species into understanding their communication? Animal Language Processing is an emerging interdisciplinary field that combines biology, bioacoustics, and AI to understand the meaning and function of animal communication: bird dialects, spider courtship dances, calls to label conspecifics (the animal equivalent of names), matriarchal clans that pass culture across generations. For machine learning, this is a vast test bed with profound implications for our relationship with the rest of nature. However, it requires defining new evaluation metrics and methods and reaching beyond anthropocentric assumptions to deal with the biggest challenge in the field: lack of ground truth or predefined labels.

Bio Marius Miron is a Senior AI Research Scientist at the Earth Species Project, where he builds machine learning and signal processing methods for bioacoustics to help decode animal communication. Previously, he worked in music AI and audio signal processing (including a PhD on orchestral music source separation) at the Music Technology Group at Pompeu Fabra University.