News, Research & Insights

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Keep up with the latest in Project CETI and hear directly from our team.

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Project CETI Announces Eco-Fit Youth Program in Collaboration with The Ashley Lashley Foundation

October 31, 2024

The Eco-Fit Youth Program will take place in over 10 primary schools in Dominica in October and November.

Yanson Hilaire

New Methods for Whale Tracking and Rendezvous Using Autonomous Robots

October 30, 2024

Project CETI and Harvard have established a new reinforcement learning framework for rendezvous with whales using autonomous robots, combining sensing from diverse sensor streams.

Project CETI at Emerson Collective Climate Science Fair

September 21, 2024

On September 21st-23rd, Project CETI will be participating in the Emerson Collective Climate Science Fair on the High Line in New York City!

Project CETI has partnered with NYU School of Law’s “More Than Human Life” Project (MOTH)

August 1, 2024

Project CETI has partnered with New York University School of Law’s “More Than Human Life” Project (MOTH) for an exciting new endeavor to explore the legal opportunities and risks of AI-assisted translations of the language of whales and other species.

2024 Decoding Communication in Non-Human Species III Blog

July 15, 2024

Project CETI held the third annual Decoding Communication in Non-Human Species workshop with the Simon’s Institute for the Theory of Computing at the University of California, Berkeley. This workshop brought scientists from a variety of fields to answer pivotal questions in the animal communication sphere.

D.S. & DURGA x Project CETI “LET’S DIVE”

June 8, 2024

D.S. & DURGA is collaborating with Project CETI, the ambitious nonprofit organization committed to translating the communication of sperm whales using artificial intelligence and state-of-the-art gentle robotics. Together we are launching a 50ml perfume named for a ‘common ground’ phrase between whale and human speak: LET’S DIVE!‍

Project CETI 2023 Annual Report

May 9, 2024

Project CETI is excited to announce the launch of our 2023 Annual Report! This annual report captures all of Project CETI's growth since our inception.

Sperm Whale Phonetic Alphabet Proposed for the First Time

May 7, 2024

Sperm whale communication exhibits structure with key similarities to aspects of human language and other primate communication systems, moving towards understanding how sperm whales transmit meaning.

UNESCO Book Day

April 23, 2024

April 23rd is the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Book Day. Dedicated to amazing past and present literature and authors across the globe, this day pays tribute to them and highlights the need for access to diverse literature and authors. ‍

Project CETI Updates

April 4, 2024

CETI achieved several major milestones over the past year. We are excited to share these updates with you all and thank you for all your support!

Project CETI featured in the New Yorker

September 4, 2023

We’re thrilled to share that Project CETI is featured in The New Yorker this week in a piece authored by Elizabeth Kolbert (best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History).

CETI hosts second annual conference

August 8, 2023

In June, CETI hosted the second annual Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species II conference at the University of California, Berkeley (US Berkeley) and is pleased to announce that the third annual conference will be held in June 2024 in Boston!

CETI

CETI Fellowship's First Graduation

July 10, 2023

We celebrate the graduation of the inaugural CETI Marine Conservation Fellows, achievements throughout the year, and introduction of the new cohort.

Fiona Korwin-Pawlowski, M.Sc. & Makeda Warner

In memory of Roger Payne

June 15, 2023

Roger may be best known for uncovering the features of whale songs, but in the process he also uncovered a fundamental truth about humans and our ability to amplify the magic of nature.

David Gruber & the CETI Team

Welcome to CETI’s new website!

May 9, 2023

Over the past year, the CETI team leaders and researchers took great strides towards our mission to listen to and translate whale communication. We’re excited to share our progress so far and bring everyone along on this journey with us.

David Gruber

AI Is Translating Whale Language, Which May Help Us Communicate With Extraterrestrials One Day

November 8, 2024

The possibility of talking to animals one day is not as far off as it may seem. A group of scientists at Project CETI, a nonprofit organization, is utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) to decode the complex calls and sounds of sperm whales with a mission to “transform human understanding & connectivity.”

The Bored Panda

New Method for Finding Sperm Whales Kind of Works Like a Rideshare App

November 1, 2024

Scientists from Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) and Harvard University are proposing a new method for finding sperm whales and predicting where they will surface using autonomous robots and a rich combination of sensor data.

Popular Science

Are Whales Trying to Tell Us Something?

October 28, 2024

Project CETI, an interdisciplinary initiative consisting of over 50 scientists, is working to uncover — and eventually decode — patterns in whale “speech.”

The Harvard Crimson

What are Animals Saying? AI May Help Decode Their Languages

October 15, 2024

A groundbreaking research project is finally building the tools to translate just how whales and other creatures communicate.

National Geographic Magazine

Talk to Me

September 1, 2024

Whales communicate with each other, and maybe they want to communicate with us. Led by David Gruber, scientists at Project CETI are combining advanced machine learning, state-of-the-art robotics and a multidisciplinary approach, to decipher their clicks and understand sperm whale communication.

Sirene

Searching for a Whale Alphabet

August 24, 2024

Scientists at Project CETI exploring the sounds of whales have found a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.” Carl Zimmer, author and writer for The New York Times, talked with Steve Paulson, putting the latest whale communications research and news into perspective.

To The Best of Our Knowledge

Listen to the Secret Coda of Whales

July 31, 2024

Scientists from Project CETI – have discovered intricacies in sperm whale vocalisations never before observed, revealing structures similar to those found in human language.

BBC

Decoding the Deep

June 26, 2024

The Cetacean Translation Initiative (Project CETI) is an ambitious effort to decipher these vocalizations, an undertaking that involves cryptographers, linguists, marine biologists, and experts in artificial intelligence and robotics. If they can gather enough data, these scientists say, they should be able to communicate for the first time with another species.

Harvard Magazine

Reinforcement Learning–Based Framework for Whale Rendezvous via Autonomous Sensing Robots

October 30, 2024

Rendezvous with sperm whales for biological observations is made challenging by their prolonged dive patterns. Here, we propose an algorithmic framework that codevelops multiagent reinforcement learning–based routing (autonomy module) and synthetic aperture radar–based very high frequency (VHF) signal–based bearing estimation (sensing module) for maximizing rendezvous opportunities of autonomous robots with sperm whales.

Science Robotics

Evidence of social learning across symbolic cultural barriers in sperm whales

May 14, 2024

Using acoustic data from the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, there is a evidence to suggest social learning in sperm whales across sociocultural boundaries.

E-Life Sciences

Contextual and Combinatorial Structure in Sperm Whale Vocalisations

May 7, 2024

Sperm whales are highly social mammals that communicate using sequences of clicks called codas. These codas are more expressive and structured than previously believed, and built from a repertoire comprising nearly an order of magnitude more distinguishable codas. These results show context-sensitive and combinatorial vocalisation can appear in organisms with divergent evolutionary lineage and vocal apparatus.

Nature Communications

Follow Anything: Open-Set Detection, Tracking, and Following in Real-Time

April 4, 2024

Tracking and following objects of interest is critical to several robotics use cases, ranging from industrial automation to logistics and warehousing, to healthcare and security.

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters

Stickiness in shear: Stiffness, shape, and sealing in bioinspired suction cups affect shear performance on diverse surfaces

March 26, 2024

Inspired by the diversity of multiple aquatic species, we investigated how bioinspired cups with different disc shapes performed in shear loading conditions. These experiments highlighted pertinent physical characteristics found in biological discs (regions of stiffness, flattened margins, a sealing rim), as well as ecologically relevant shearing conditions.

Bioinspiration & Biomimetics

Detecting the Presence of Sperm Whales’ Echolocation Clicks in Noisy Environments

March 24, 2024

Sperm whales navigate underwater with a series of impulsive, click-like sounds known as echolocation clicks. These clicks are characterized by a multipulse structure (MPS) that serves as a distinctive pattern. In this work, we use the stability of the MPS as a detection metric for recognizing and classifying the presence of clicks in noisy environments.

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing

Studying the effect of camera tag associated white light on the diving and foraging behavior of Eastern Caribbean sperm whales

January 1, 2024

Studying the behavior of animals roaming the deep-sea is challenging and is driven by technological developments.

iScience

Vowels and Diphthongs in Sperm Whales

December 4, 2023

Sperm whale vocalizations are among the most intriguing communication systems in the animal kingdom. Traditionally, sperm whale codas, or groups of clicks, have been primarily analyzed in terms of the number of clicks and their inter-click timing.

OSF Preprints

A Theory of Unsupervised Translation Motivated by Understanding Animal Communication

September 21, 2023

Recent years have seen breakthroughs in neural language models that capture nuances of language, culture, and knowledge. Neural networks are capable of translating between languages -- in some cases even between two languages where there is little or no access to parallel translations, in what is known as Unsupervised Machine Translation (UMT).

arXiv

Inter-pulse estimation for sperm whale click detection

September 21, 2023

Sperm whales are characterized by the inter-pulse interval (IPI) of their vocalization, which is a function of the whales’ size. In this paper, we propose a new methodology for detecting and extracting features from the IPI of sperm whale clicks.

IEEE

Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference

March 20, 2023

This paper proposes a methodology for discovering meaningful properties in data by exploring the latent space of unsupervised deep generative models. We combine manipulation of individual latent variables to extreme values outside the training range with methods inspired by causal inference into an approach we call causal disentanglement with extreme values (CDEV) and show that this approach yields insights for model interpretability.

arXiv

Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales

June 17, 2022

Machine learning has been advancing dramatically over the past decade. Most strides are human-based applications due to the availability of large-scale datasets; however, opportunities are ripe to apply this technology to more deeply understand non-human communication.

iScience

Deep Machine Learning Techniques for the Detection and Classification of Sperm Whale Bioacoustics

August 29, 2019

We implemented Machine Learning (ML) techniques to advance the study of sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus) bioacoustics. This entailed employing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to construct an echolocation click detector designed to classify spectrograms generated from sperm whale acoustic data according to the presence or absence of a click.

Scientific Reports

Listen to the Whales!

We’ll keep you up-to-date on the latest breakthroughs and progress.

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