ETCKon

The Dr. Dolittle Project - scientists
join forces to better understand animal chatter



Mr. Ed spoke his mind in plain English, but most animals are not so easy to understand. Now, a group of scientists is trying to decode the meaning behind the growls, clucks and neighs, hoping to improve captive animals' lives and humans' abilities to track their numbers in the wild.

Called the Dr. Dolittle Project, the effort includes scientists from several universities and institutions. They are studying animals and building a database of the sounds they make, along with accompanying behaviors.

"Our basic goal is to understand what they're saying, at some level or another," said project leader and Marquette University assistant professor Mike Johnson.

To do this, researchers are applying human speech technology to animal chatter. For the past five years, Johnson and his colleagues have been recording animals like African elephants, dogs, whales and chickens, and videotaping or observing the concurrent behaviors, such as swimming or eating.

Researchers feed observations and sound recordings into a computer that uses algorithms to analyze and group the sounds according to what the scientists would like to study (for example, calls elephants make while playing). Each sound can also be matched with an individual label, marking things like the animal it came from.

Now, researchers are adding more sounds to the computer database without telling the computer associated behaviors or which animals they come from. By doing this, they hope the computer can learn to determine what the sounds mean, said Pete Scheifele, an assistant professor in residence at the University of Connecticut and one of Johnson's Dr. Dolittle Project colleagues.

In developing a computer-based speech-processing technology with remote monitoring systems, the researchers imagine it could be used to alert aquaria managers or zookeepers when their animals are distressed, or keep tabs on species' populations in the wild through tracking their unique calls. Or it could help ranchers or zookeepers recognize changes in their animals' moods, assisting them to keep the beasts content or make appropriate adjustments.

"We're not up to that point yet, but from an animal welfare point of view that's one of the things this computer model will let us do," Scheifele said.

The speech-recognition technologies could also help researchers develop methods for conducting a census on animals in the wild. Eventually, they hope to set up a wireless microphone network somewhere, to record animal sounds and transmit them to a distant computer where an algorithm would analyze them and give an estimate of the number of a certain species in the recorded area. This would be much less invasive than species-tracking methods like capturing, tagging and then re-spotting animals, and easier when dealing with flighty animals, like birds, Johnson said.

"I think it's possible," Johnson said, though he added, "I think there are quite a few technical hurdles to overcome before you could get to a deployed system." These include a cost barrier; they'd want to use dozens of microphone nodes, and he estimated each would cost several hundred dollars.

Douglas Nelson, director of Cornell University's Borror Laboratory of Acoustics, which studies and archives animal sounds, said automatically recognizing animal sounds can be difficult because they can be variable.

"Just discriminating animal sounds from background noise can be a considerable challenge," he said.

Background noise is definitely a concern to Dr. Dolittle Project contributors -- some of Scheifele's work centers on the effects ambient noise has on animals, and how it could impede their ability to chat with one another.

Over time, researchers want to build their sound library with more animals, and more exotic animals like dolphins, tigers and rhinos. Scheifele is already recording horses with University of Rhode Island adjunct professor David Browning, as part of what they call the Equine Vocalization Project; this data should eventually be tapped by the Dr. Dolittle Project.

Could all this lead to a better version of 2002's doggie translator, the Bowlingual?

Sure, but it's not just a matter of creating better computer algorithms to analyze creature calls, Johnson said. "You need a better understanding of the animal communication process," he said.

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/l...?tw=wn_index_4

Jon Clark - BANNED FOR LIFE

To long for me to read.....

ETCKon

Then increase the speed by reading relevant words relating to the article

Kimo

wtf? thats odd as hell...

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sniperwolf

That's how my elder brotha taught me when I was a bit young.. fosho, you'll comeup with the main idea

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tony286

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MikeVega

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