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I like the nature sounds idea a lot. Our hearing is immensely sophisticated and we could probably develop an immersive experience of this for network monitoring

I like the nature sounds idea a lot. Our hearing is immensely sophisticated and we could probably develop an immersive experience of this for network monitoring with the right metrics. The idea of a secops analyst sitting by a virtual reality campfire, listening to their "surroundings," and then investigating based on environmental changes is pretty cyberpunk, and absolutely doable with something like this. Nature sounds as a complete UX metaphor is pretty amazing, and rich sound environments may be the missing immersive bit in VR/AR games. This is timely, as just last night I was by a fire listening to a field of crickets and wondering if I could use a GAN to learn to interact with their fabric of noise and then convince the crickets to modulate their chirps according to the GAN's feedback. I then wondered how plausible it could be that this had already happened to us. Indeed, that kind of night. But these are the most interesting problems, and adversarial AI for insect control using their own audible telemetry has to be the most viable path for having it interact with biological systems. If it can't pass an insect Turing test, it probably can't pass a human one. Thank you for posting this, it was truly a hidden gem.

gorkish 4y ago
I have heard that humans are much better at discerning small differences in frequency and recognizing patterns in audio than we are if we look at a graph/chart/table visually. Virginia Tech and others have been doing some "data sonification" work in recent years that seems really interesting. Destin of the Youtube channel Smarter Every Day did something similar to your hypothetical cricket experiment with fireflies and LEDs recently where he was able to alter the group's behavior.
mprovost 4y ago
You can calculate the temperature by listening to cricket chirps! They chirp faster (more often) as it gets warmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law
- motohagiography 4y ago
  Wow. So, we would have a control input for the model for correlating chirps, where mics and thermometers around a field could measure chirp frequency against a baseline of temperature. Next question would be whether crickets migrate toward the chirp-signaled higher temperatures, and whether they submit to signalled chirps or trust their own in their migration decisions. Sound is just relatively low frequency data, and a field of crickets would give a uniquely large sample signal data set.

gorkish 4y ago

I have heard that humans are much better at discerning small differences in frequency and recognizing patterns in audio than we are if we look at a graph/chart/table visually. Virginia Tech and others have been doing some "data sonification" work in recent years that seems really interesting. Destin of the Youtube channel Smarter Every Day did something similar to your hypothetical cricket experiment with fireflies and LEDs recently where he was able to alter the group's behavior.

mprovost 4y ago

You can calculate the temperature by listening to cricket chirps! They chirp faster (more often) as it gets warmer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolbear%27s_law

motohagiography 4y ago
Wow. So, we would have a control input for the model for correlating chirps, where mics and thermometers around a field could measure chirp frequency against a baseline of temperature. Next question would be whether crickets migrate toward the chirp-signaled higher temperatures, and whether they submit to signalled chirps or trust their own in their migration decisions. Sound is just relatively low frequency data, and a field of crickets would give a uniquely large sample signal data set.