Friday Night AI: Listening to the Wild: Can AI Help Us Understand Animal Communication?

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For millennia, humans have been fascinated by the sounds and signals of the animal kingdom. Researchers in biology and environmental science have made significant progress in studying animal communication, revealing complex vocal patterns and their roles in social interactions, navigation, and survival. Recently, AI has started to complement this work by analyzing vast datasets, identifying patterns, and offering new perspectives on vocalizations—from decoding the meaning behind dog barks and primate calls to analyzing whale songs and bird communication. How much can AI truly reveal about animal communication? What are its current capabilities and limitations? Join us for a discussion with AI researchers and animal communication experts as we explore the latest advances in this space. With interactive activities developed by graduate student Yara El-Tawil.

About the speakers:

Thore Bergman is a Professor of Psychology and Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Michigan. He is interested in how primates use communication and cognition to navigate the social world. Thore studies wild primates because he is interested in both the causes of behavioral variation (what makes one animal respond a certain way while a different animal does something else?) and the consequences of behavior (how does the behavior affect their survival and reproduction?). Thore’s main study subjects are capuchin monkeys in Costa Rica and geladas in Ethiopia.

Artem Abzaliev is a PhD student working on Multimodal Machine Learning/AI with a particular interest in analyzing and understanding Animal Communication with AI models. His research studied dog and bird vocalizations. He is also a dog lover!

Álvaro Vega-Hidalgo is a PhD student whose work focuses on computational approaches to studying animal communication and enhancing wildlife conservation through community-centered design. His research is driven by the intrinsic value of wildlife-human coexistence and fundamental questions about the evolution of language. Before joining UMich, he worked at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, where he helped scaling AI systems across continents to monitor birds globally with the help of citizen science. He also contributed to Biometrio.earth, a German company focused on Carbon Credit Transparency using AI.

Moderator: Rada Mihalcea is the Janice M. Jenkins Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan and the Director of the Michigan Artificial Intelligence Lab. Her research interests are in natural language processing, with a focus on multimodal processing and computational social sciences. She is an ACM Fellow, a AAAI Fellow, and served as ACL President (2018-2022 Vice/Past). She is the recipient of a Sarah Goddard Power award (2019) for her contributions to diversity in science, and the recipient of a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers awarded by President Obama (2009).