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USING AI TO DECODE WHALE COMMUNICATIONS: A Conversation with Roger Payne and Daniela Rus FiRe is back! Register now for Future in Review to take advantage of Summer Earlybird pricing. FiRe returns live at the beautiful Terranea Resort in Palos Verdes, CA, November 6-9. Join old friends and new at this life-changing event. _____ Why Read: This week we lost one of our great friends and one of the greatest voices in celebrating whales and ocean health: Roger Payne. Roger was a source of scientific wonder and personal wisdom for many generations of conservationists and whale scientists in the past, and no doubt in the future. Beginning with his discovery that humpback whales sang songs, and his brilliant idea to share these with the world, through a lifetime of helping us comprehend the critical importance of the health of the ocean in understanding planetary health, Roger was the best. For our members who have been to past FiRe conferences, Roger was an almost annual intellectual treat, whose brilliance on stage, and wry humor in conversation, will never be forgotten. In his honor, we are sharing a transcript of a previously unpublished SNS virtual FiReSide conversation we had in 2021 with Roger and Daniela Rus, head of MIT's Toyota-CSAIL Joint Research Center, about a top-secret project just getting under way and about the science of using AI to understand whale communications. For those who can join us at FiRe 2023 this fall, we will also be celebrating Roger through his son John's work, onstage and in conversations, as the mandala continues to turn. I hope you all enjoy Roger, here and now, one more time. - mra _______
[This transcript has been lightly edited for print.] Introduction with Janet Thomas Berit Anderson: Welcome, everyone, to FiReSide, our monthly virtual intelligence session. We are talking this month about using AI to decode whale communications, which I'm very excited about. And we are here today with Daniela Rus and Roger Payne, and Janet Thomas will introduce them more fully in just a moment. My name is Berit Anderson, and I'm the director of programs for Strategic News Service.
I want to take a minute to thank our event partners, without whom we would not be able to put on these incredible conversations. First, we'd like to thank Pattern Computer, which is now proud to be taking its two major pattern discoveries and triple-negative breast-cancer treatment into live animal trials. And we'd like to thank our alliance partners, who help us get the word out about these events: the Crescent Forum, the world's largest angel investor network; and the Technology Alliance Group, which promotes, educates, and advocates for technology businesses. If you are interested in partnering with either side in any way, feel free to reach out to me, at berit@stratnews.com. And we have so many amazing guests tonight that we'll be giving everyone a chance to just have kind of an informal hangout at the end. To start, I would like to introduce Mark Anderson. Mark is the CEO of Strategic News Service and the CEO of Pattern Computer, and he has a long history of doing many incredible things. So, Mark, take it away. Mark Anderson: Thank you, Berit. I'm really excited about this evening's West Coast event. Many of us on this call have been interested in whales and in animal communication and in AI for a long, long time, and particularly about whales, and we have some great people to talk to today. We also have great people in the audience. I'll come back to that in a little bit, but it's very, very exciting. Everyone involved is going to be terrific, and I'm going to learn more than any of the rest of you, I'm sure. So I'm personally excited about it. Our first guest is Janet Thomas. Janet is a very longtime friend of mine. She lives, as I do, on San Juan Island, in the Puget Sound area, and she is an activist and a writer of some repute. And lucky for us, she is also the executive director of Orca Relief Citizens' Alliance, which remains the only not-for-profit whose sole charter is to discover why these wonderful local orca whales have been dying and to put an end to it, to help the community respond and grow again. She's been doing this job for years, and I think it's appropriate to mention that this is not an easy task. There are many places in the world where - and I'm sure you all know this - where whale watchers, whale-watching people, get along quite well with the population and with the scientists. I think of Cape Cod, for instance, where they all work together on projects. Not here. So for whatever strange reason, it's a very tough job to be the only person fighting hard for these whales, and she is tough enough to do it. So, without going any further, Janet, I will welcome you to the conversation. Janet Thomas: Thank you. MRA: I think we'll start, Janet, by talking about, if you don't mind, what is it about these whales that attracted you, and why do you think they're so special? JT: I had a personal experience with the Southern Resident killer whales shortly after moving to the island. That was in 1991; it was an early spring morning, and I'd taken a friend to the ferry, and I was coming back along the west side, and suddenly there was a pod of orcas. I'd never seen them up close before. I'd lived on Bainbridge Island for many years, but that was before the orcas had become commercial and renowned. And I remember, I just stopped the car, and I was in complete awe at their playfulness, at the ways in which they interacted with each other - and they were in the kelp beds, right off the shoreline. And it just looked like they were having an extraordinarily wonderful time celebrating each other and celebrating their lives. They had a very, very big impact on me. And then years later, Mark, you had the impact on me, when I discovered that Orca Relief was working really hard to save the Southern Residents. MRA: Right. Well, for those who don't know, we are lucky enough to be the home of the Southern Resident killer whale population. There are two of these: northern and southern. And these are - and Roger, correct me if I say anything incorrect here - but these are the only two resident orca populations on the planet. So while these are worldwide as a species, yes, this group has been declared an endangered species within that story, and they've been crashing since about 1997. So a very large part of why we [Orca Relief] exist and what Janet does every day is to reverse that trend. That's her work, really. That's her passion today. When you think about this, Janet, can you give a quick description of the current survival situation for this population of Southern Residents? JT: I just want to give a heartbeat of history first, because these Southern Residents have been part of our First Peoples' lives for more than 5,000 years. MRA: Right. JT: They have a very, very long, deep, and intimate history with the First Peoples in this area. So, what was the point of your question, Mark? MRA: What is the status of their survival today? JT: The status is that they're critically endangered. They're facing extinction. There are 75 of them. In 1995, there were 97. There was recently a newborn, which has been getting some attention; hopefully not too much attention. They're on their way - they could conceivably be on their way back, but they have not established that pattern yet. They are still critically endangered. MRA: Let me add that the whale-watching industry . . . So, these are toothed whales, for those who know the difference, and they need to use sound to get food. And so, we understood from some work done by the University of Washington a long time ago - back in 1998, I think - they took a very close look at the population. We ended up with a sentence that described the problem at the time, and we were the first to predict the crash of this population. The sentence goes: "In times of low Chinook salmon count, the presence of motorized craft increases their need for food and decreases their ability to use their sonar to get it, and they starve." End of sentence. JT: And it's as straightforward as it can get. MRA: Yep. |
