By Jackson Vanfleet Brown

You may have heard on the news about the innovative Cetacean Translation Initiative (Project CETI) <https://www.projectceti.org/>, led by a team of experts who seek to decode the language of another species: sperm whales (Macrocephalus physeter). Funded by TED audacious, the project’s founders believe that we are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in inter-species communication enabled by AI and the advances that have brought us LLMs and many other unprecedented insights into our own language. Covered by major media outlets including the New York Times and Washington Post, over the past months many of my personal friends and family have shared the news of Project CETI with me, drawing a connection to what they know about my master’s thesis.

While I also used computational tools to study recordings of whales communicating with one another, my focus was not on what was being communicated, rather on which species was doing the communicating. It was an important question to address in my region, coastal California, because inability to discriminate between several closely related species in acoustic recordings was inhibiting the effort to monitor their population size and health. Through my project I was able to take advantage of a training set of recordings of known species to fit a model that discriminated between them using a suite of acoustic features.

Nearing my graduation and searching for future direction, I began to wonder where my growing interest and experience in computational science and ocean acoustics was leading me. Professor Roee Diamant, a participating supervisor in the ALSO graduate research exchange program, caught my attention because of his prominent role as the lead of underwater acoustics for Project CETI. We ended up drafting a proposal for a project that uses Project CETI data – recordings of sperm whales in the Eastern Caribbean –  to better understand the soundscape of the ocean, how it reveals important discoveries, and what its different constituents are and how they affect one another.

A professor in the marine technologies department at University of Haifa, Israel, Prof Diamant <https://sites.google.com/edu.haifa.ac.il/anl/anl> has helped deploy the instruments that are now acquiring the monstrous data set required to achieve the aims of Project CETI. This includes both stationary moorings and tags attached to the whales which are recording their vocalizations in a special area in the Eastern Caribbean near Dominica. The applicability of the data set is far from limited to the primary objectives of decoding the whales’ language. We have thus devised a small project that has application towards conservation and marine ecology, which builds on Roee’s past investigations of the impact of ship noise on marine fauna.

Together with Prof. Diamant, I will investigate the extent to which sperm whales are affected by underwater radiated noise – the noise that ships and boats emit from their propellers and onboard machinery. In the area where Project CETI data is being acquired, there is in addition to whales a passenger ferry route. Since acoustic disturbances have been shown to impact the physiology and behavior of many species in numerous other studies, our study will investigate whether such a connection can be shown to exist for this area and for this whale population.

Under the guidance of Prof. Diamant and his lab, I am looking forward to building up my own machine learning and data science expertise, while maintaining a focus in the domain that stimulates my curiosity – marine bioacoustics and acoustical ecology. Thank you to LOREX for making this possible.