[imglorp]

I am saddened by how long we've known about cetacean communications--decades--and how little progress there's been, given the giant strides tech has made in DSP and pattern matching. If only we applied a fraction of the tech effort we put into cell phones or weapons.

[daeken]

I imagine that a large part of this is simply a lack of interest on the part of tech folks. Many fields of biology need people with coding backgrounds, but tech people are often completely unaware of this or (in my case, most of the time) have no idea how to get in touch with the people who need them.

I'd love to contribute to this kind of thing, but haven't the foggiest notion of how.

[M_Grey]

People seem to be generally highly apathetic to notion that anything other than humans might exhibit complex behaviors worth studying. It probably doesn't help that there's money in cell phones and weapons, but you can't even convince people to stop killing dolphins, never mind learn something about them.

I also have to wonder if there's some deep dread that we're going to learn just what a crime our treatment of quite a few species has been, and continues to be. If we face it, gather evidence to support what is currently only a series of likely hypotheses, we might have to change our behavior or learn ugly truths about ourselves.

[astrodust]

Crazy idea: Crowdsource it.

If we can gamify protein folding (https://fold.it/portal/) and find scientifically useful answers, why not the same with cetacean languages?

[daeken]

The reason that protein folding and other large-scale projects (e.g. SETI@Home) work is because there's enough data to go around. I think that these projects are likely bound by the fairly small bits of data they have available.

If we could get an open dataset of cetacean sounds along with a tagged assessment of the scenario (i.e. how many were around, were they agitated, etc) then this kind of project could be very interesting.

[Houshalter]

A better model is Kaggle. Kaggle releases data, and then challenges people to produce statistical models that can fit the data the best. Hundreds of people compete and best the results are usually very good.

However as far as I know there isn't that much data available for dolphins (and especially not labelled data, though the unlabelled data may be useful as well.)

[microtherion]

There was a session today at Interspeech dedicated to the study of animal vocalization, though participants acknowledged that the field is still nascent. One of the posters was on Dolphin communication: http://www.interspeech2016.org/Technical-Program