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Learning to speak dolphin
TECHNOLOGY Flip Nicklin/Minden Pictures/FLPA
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with Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, on a project named Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT). They want to work with dolphins to “co-create” a language that uses features of sounds that wild dolphins communicate with naturally.
“The idea is to work with dolphins to create a language featuring sounds dolphins already use” Knowing what to listen for is a huge challenge. Dolphins can produce sound at frequencies up to 200 kilohertz – around 10 times as high as the highest –Fancy meeting you here– pitch we can hear – and can also shift a signal’s pitch or stretch it out over a long period of time. The animals can also project sound in different directions without turning their heads, making it difficult to use visual cues alone to identify which two-way communication with dolphins, first using rudimentary dolphin in a pod “said” what and to guess what a sound artificial sounds, then by getting might mean. them to associate the sounds To record, interpret and with four large icons on an respond to dolphin sounds, underwater “keyboard”. Starner and his students are By pointing their bodies at the building a prototype device different symbols, the dolphins featuring a smartphone-sized could make requests – to play with a piece of seaweed or ride the computer and two hydrophones capable of detecting the full bow wave of the divers’ boat, for range of dolphin sounds. example. The system managed A diver will carry the computer to get the dolphins’ attention, Herzing says, but wasn’t “dolphin- in a waterproof case worn across friendly” enough to be successful. the chest, and LEDs embedded around the diver’s mask will Herzing is now collaborating light up to show where a sound picked up by the hydrophones originates from. The diver will also have a Twiddler – a handheld The software has also identified device that acts as a combination gym routines – dumb-bell curls, for of mouse and keyboard – for example – by analysing readings from selecting what kind of sound accelerometers worn by the person to make in response. exercising, even though the software Herzing and Starner will start had not previously encountered such testing the system on wild data. However, Starner cautions that Atlantic spotted dolphins if meaning must be ascribed to the (Stenella frontalis) in the middle patterns picked out by the software, of this year. At first, divers will then this will require human input. play back one of eight “words” coined by the team to mean >
Learning to speak dolphin A computer system that divers can wear may bridge the language barrier between us and dolphins MacGregor Campbell
A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins. Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.
But communication in most of these early experiments was oneway, says Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida. “They create a system and expect the dolphins to learn it, and they do, but the dolphins are not empowered to use the system to request things from the humans,” she says. Since 1998, Herzing and colleagues have been attempting
Pattern detector The software that Thad Starner is using to make sense of dolphin sounds was originally designed by him and a former student, David Minnen, to “discover” interesting features in any data set. After analysing a signlanguage video, the software labelled 23 of 40 signs used. It also identified when the person started and stopped signing, or scratched their head.
7 May 2011 | NewScientist | 23
TECHNOLOGY
24 | NewScientist | 7 May 2011
Drive-by advertising Duncan Graham-Rowe
DRIVERS are already bombarded with advertising on billboards and vehicles. Now even car windows could become part of the advertisers’ canvas. Wallen Mphepö of the Beijing Normal University in China has come up with a way to turn car windows into billboards that could be used to display dynamic adverts and public safety messages. Mphepö has developed a polymer film that can be attached to a window to act as a kind of screen, picking up images projected from inside the vehicle and transmitting them to viewers outside through a series of microscopic mirror-like structures. Thin vertical strips
of clear film in between these structures allow the driver to see through the window as normal, Mphepö says. Advertisers could use GPS to tailor the ads to the area where the car happens to be, or the time of day. “There’s no point in displaying ads for a great breakfast place at a time when people are effectively looking to go to dinner,” Mphepö says. He will present a prototype device that gives a 2D image at the Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles later this month. He believes he can produce a 3D image without the need for glasses by using the mirrored strips to display alternating images on either side of each transparent strip, angled so as to be viewed
Know where the wind blows to boost capacity
getty images
Advertising could soon be projected onto car windows, but will this compromise safety?
chip simons/getty
< “seaweed” or “bow wave ride”, for example. The software will listen to see if the dolphins mimic them. Once the system can recognise these mimicked words, the idea is to use it to crack a much harder problem: listening to natural dolphin sounds and pulling out salient features that may be the “fundamental units” of dolphin communication. The researchers don’t know what these units might be. But the algorithms they are using are designed to sift through any unfamiliar data set and pick out interesting features (see “Pattern detector”, p 23). The software does this by assuming an average state for the data and labelling features that deviate from it. It then groups similar types of deviations – distinct sets of clicks or whistles, say – and continues to do so until it has extracted all potentially interesting patterns. Once these units are identified, Herzing hopes to combine them to make dolphin-like signals that the animals find more interesting than human-coined “words”. By associating behaviours and objects with these sounds, she may be the first to decode the rudiments of dolphins’ natural language. Justin Gregg of the Dolphin Communication Project, a nonprofit organisation in Old Mystic, Connecticut, thinks that getting wild dolphins to adopt and use artificial “words” could work, but is sceptical that the team will find “fundamental units” of natural dolphin communication. Even if they do, deciphering their meanings and using them in the correct context poses a daunting challenge. “Imagine if an alien species landed on Earth wearing elaborate spacesuits and walked through Manhattan speaking random lines from The Godfather to passers-by,” he says. “We don’t even know if dolphins have words,” Herzing admits. But she adds, “We could use their signals, if we knew them. We just don’t.” n
by the left or right eye. Mphepö ultimately hopes to design 3D cinema screens using the same micro-mirror approach. The idea is interesting but could divert drivers’ attention away from the road, says Paul Green at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. Even though drivers are used to seeing adverts, “a dynamic display would cause you to look longer at these
WIND farms need to connect to the grid, but existing power lines may not have spare capacity, and new lines can cost over £1 million per kilometre. Now a computer model is being developed to help engineers exploit the boost given to existing capacity by the wind itself. Heat is a limiting factor for power lines; increasing the load makes them hotter and power lines have a maximum operating temperature of 80 ˚C. Above this the wires expand, causing them to sag. If they touch trees they can short circuit, causing a power outage – just like the US blackout in 2003 which left tens of millions of people without power. At present, estimates of power line capacity are static and conservative. They also don’t take into account the effect of weather conditions, such as wind. “Wind can have a big effect,” says Kurt Myers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), part of the team –Cool the line to increase the load– behind the model. “It can increase
For more technology stories, visit newscientist.com/technology
with Thad Starner, an artificial intelligence researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, on a project named Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT). They want to work with dolphins to “co-create” a language that uses features of sounds that wild dolphins communicate with naturally.
“The idea is to work with dolphins to create a language featuring sounds dolphins already use” Knowing what to listen for is a huge challenge. Dolphins can produce sound at frequencies up to 200 kilohertz – around 10 times as high as the highest –Fancy meeting you here– pitch we can hear – and can also shift a signal’s pitch or stretch it out over a long period of time. The animals can also project sound in different directions without turning their heads, making it difficult to use visual cues alone to identify which two-way communication with dolphins, first using rudimentary dolphin in a pod “said” what and to guess what a sound artificial sounds, then by getting might mean. them to associate the sounds To record, interpret and with four large icons on an respond to dolphin sounds, underwater “keyboard”. Starner and his students are By pointing their bodies at the building a prototype device different symbols, the dolphins featuring a smartphone-sized could make requests – to play with a piece of seaweed or ride the computer and two hydrophones capable of detecting the full bow wave of the divers’ boat, for range of dolphin sounds. example. The system managed A diver will carry the computer to get the dolphins’ attention, Herzing says, but wasn’t “dolphin- in a waterproof case worn across friendly” enough to be successful. the chest, and LEDs embedded around the diver’s mask will Herzing is now collaborating light up to show where a sound picked up by the hydrophones originates from. The diver will also have a Twiddler – a handheld The software has also identified device that acts as a combination gym routines – dumb-bell curls, for of mouse and keyboard – for example – by analysing readings from selecting what kind of sound accelerometers worn by the person to make in response. exercising, even though the software Herzing and Starner will start had not previously encountered such testing the system on wild data. However, Starner cautions that Atlantic spotted dolphins if meaning must be ascribed to the (Stenella frontalis) in the middle patterns picked out by the software, of this year. At first, divers will then this will require human input. play back one of eight “words” coined by the team to mean >
Learning to speak dolphin A computer system that divers can wear may bridge the language barrier between us and dolphins MacGregor Campbell
A DIVER carrying a computer that tries to recognise dolphin sounds and generate responses in real time will soon attempt to communicate with wild dolphins off the coast of Florida. If the bid is successful, it will be a big step towards two-way communication between humans and dolphins. Since the 1960s, captive dolphins have been communicating via pictures and sounds. In the 1990s, Louis Herman of the Kewalo Basin Marine Mammal Laboratory in Honolulu, Hawaii, found that bottlenose dolphins can keep track of over 100 different words. They can also respond appropriately to commands in which the same words appear in a different order, understanding the difference between “bring the surfboard to the man” and “bring the man to the surfboard”, for example.
But communication in most of these early experiments was oneway, says Denise Herzing, founder of the Wild Dolphin Project in Jupiter, Florida. “They create a system and expect the dolphins to learn it, and they do, but the dolphins are not empowered to use the system to request things from the humans,” she says. Since 1998, Herzing and colleagues have been attempting
Pattern detector The software that Thad Starner is using to make sense of dolphin sounds was originally designed by him and a former student, David Minnen, to “discover” interesting features in any data set. After analysing a signlanguage video, the software labelled 23 of 40 signs used. It also identified when the person started and stopped signing, or scratched their head.
7 May 2011 | NewScientist | 23
TECHNOLOGY
24 | NewScientist | 7 May 2011
Drive-by advertising Duncan Graham-Rowe
DRIVERS are already bombarded with advertising on billboards and vehicles. Now even car windows could become part of the advertisers’ canvas. Wallen Mphepö of the Beijing Normal University in China has come up with a way to turn car windows into billboards that could be used to display dynamic adverts and public safety messages. Mphepö has developed a polymer film that can be attached to a window to act as a kind of screen, picking up images projected from inside the vehicle and transmitting them to viewers outside through a series of microscopic mirror-like structures. Thin vertical strips
of clear film in between these structures allow the driver to see through the window as normal, Mphepö says. Advertisers could use GPS to tailor the ads to the area where the car happens to be, or the time of day. “There’s no point in displaying ads for a great breakfast place at a time when people are effectively looking to go to dinner,” Mphepö says. He will present a prototype device that gives a 2D image at the Society for Information Display conference in Los Angeles later this month. He believes he can produce a 3D image without the need for glasses by using the mirrored strips to display alternating images on either side of each transparent strip, angled so as to be viewed
Know where the wind blows to boost capacity
getty images
Advertising could soon be projected onto car windows, but will this compromise safety?
chip simons/getty
< “seaweed” or “bow wave ride”, for example. The software will listen to see if the dolphins mimic them. Once the system can recognise these mimicked words, the idea is to use it to crack a much harder problem: listening to natural dolphin sounds and pulling out salient features that may be the “fundamental units” of dolphin communication. The researchers don’t know what these units might be. But the algorithms they are using are designed to sift through any unfamiliar data set and pick out interesting features (see “Pattern detector”, p 23). The software does this by assuming an average state for the data and labelling features that deviate from it. It then groups similar types of deviations – distinct sets of clicks or whistles, say – and continues to do so until it has extracted all potentially interesting patterns. Once these units are identified, Herzing hopes to combine them to make dolphin-like signals that the animals find more interesting than human-coined “words”. By associating behaviours and objects with these sounds, she may be the first to decode the rudiments of dolphins’ natural language. Justin Gregg of the Dolphin Communication Project, a nonprofit organisation in Old Mystic, Connecticut, thinks that getting wild dolphins to adopt and use artificial “words” could work, but is sceptical that the team will find “fundamental units” of natural dolphin communication. Even if they do, deciphering their meanings and using them in the correct context poses a daunting challenge. “Imagine if an alien species landed on Earth wearing elaborate spacesuits and walked through Manhattan speaking random lines from The Godfather to passers-by,” he says. “We don’t even know if dolphins have words,” Herzing admits. But she adds, “We could use their signals, if we knew them. We just don’t.” n
by the left or right eye. Mphepö ultimately hopes to design 3D cinema screens using the same micro-mirror approach. The idea is interesting but could divert drivers’ attention away from the road, says Paul Green at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute in Ann Arbor. Even though drivers are used to seeing adverts, “a dynamic display would cause you to look longer at these
WIND farms need to connect to the grid, but existing power lines may not have spare capacity, and new lines can cost over £1 million per kilometre. Now a computer model is being developed to help engineers exploit the boost given to existing capacity by the wind itself. Heat is a limiting factor for power lines; increasing the load makes them hotter and power lines have a maximum operating temperature of 80 ˚C. Above this the wires expand, causing them to sag. If they touch trees they can short circuit, causing a power outage – just like the US blackout in 2003 which left tens of millions of people without power. At present, estimates of power line capacity are static and conservative. They also don’t take into account the effect of weather conditions, such as wind. “Wind can have a big effect,” says Kurt Myers at Idaho National Laboratory (INL), part of the team –Cool the line to increase the load– behind the model. “It can increase