Rock Star, Web Founder Team Up on Tech for Humans to Communicate With Animals...
Rock Star and Web Founder
Teaming Up on Technology
Thomas Seal July 18,
2020
(Bloomberg) -- A rock star, a
vegan financier and a pioneer of the internet are backing a project to
find ways for humans to communicate with animals using machine learning and
artificial intelligence.
The Interspecies I/O forum on Friday
announced the Coller Prize for Interspecies Conversation, a $1 million research
award, according to a statement. The effort kicks off this weekend with a
video conference on
subjects running from the language of bonobo apes to the music of elephants.
Interspecies I/O’s leading
figures include musician Peter Gabriel, Vint Cerf -- who helped to design the
TCP/IP architecture that underpins the internet -- and private equity veteran
Jeremy Coller, a backer of “shoot-for-the-moon” philanthropic projects and part
of a network of investors, who has personally said he would like to end factory
farming.
“Now that machine learning
has become a powerful tool, one can start imagining trying to extract signals
from the interactions that we observe intra-species, in the same way that we
train the machine learning systems to translate between languages,” said Cerf
on a video call. “The edgy part of this, the really edgy part, is what if an
alien showed up? How would we interact?”
No one is yet close to
creating an “artificial Dr. Dolittle,” said Cerf. However, he said technology
that enhances people’s communication with their pets would be a lucrative
market: “People spend an enormous amount of money on their pets. Pets are big
business.”
The group’s members include
cognitive psychologist and marine mammal scientist Diana Reiss and Neil
Gershenfeld, head of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms. They said recent advances
in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and big data make their audacious
goal more realistic.
Gabriel, Cerf, Reiss and
Gershenfeld have been collaborating on ways to decipher the language of animals
for several years, and Coller recently brought more financial heft to those
efforts.
©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
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