Towards Decoding Dolphin Communication
May 19, 2026 — 12:45 pm - 01:00 pmMain Stage
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Description
For millennia humans have wondered what animals might be saying to each other, but (and not for lack of trying), we have never been able to decode their language. Modern machine learning systems have shown great promise and have already solved many problems previously thought to be impossible. This talk explores our efforts to use self-supervised machine learning to understand and interpret dolphin communication. First, we present a system that can "rediscover" the meaning of human language without a teacher, through watching unlabeled video. Second, we examine the challenge of applying these techniques to wild dolphin footage and share some preliminary techniques and observations.

