What We Do

Gelada monkeys groom each other. Photo by Rieke T-bo.

Gelada monkeys groom each other. Photo by Rieke T-bo.

TechnologyRoadmapProjectsPublicationsTalks and Lectures

Our roadmap to decode

The motivating intuition for ESP was that modern machine learning can build powerful semantic representations of language which we can use to unlock communication with other species. We have recently developed a technical roadmap of our current and proposed scientific work, based on the key stages outlined below. 

We are currently engaged in a number of critical AI research projects which feature on this roadmap and which have been developed in close partnership with our partners in biology and machine learning.

  • Creating unified benchmarks and data, acoustic and multimodal, to validate our experiments and accelerate the field, vetted by top biologists and AI researchers 
  • Turning motion into meaning — automatic behavior discovery from large-scale animal-borne tag data
  • Training self-supervised foundation models such as HuBERT and evaluating them against our benchmarks
  • Establishing semantic generation and editing of communication — which will ultimately allow for the creation of new signals that carry meaning and unlock two-way communication with another species.
TechnologyProjects

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“I was just working with a student yesterday on a section of whistles that was so dense that we decided we weren't going to be able to do anything with it... Maybe there is hope for the future!”
Laela Sayigh, Specialist Researcher, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Associate Professor, Hampshire College, on ESP's work on the Cocktail Party Problem