8 ms·

AI can catalogue a forest's inhabitants simply by listening

192 points by helsinkiandrew 3y ago

helsinkiandrew 3y ago
https://archive.ph/yBaZe https://archive.ph/yBaZe
bloqs 3y ago
It's headlines like this that really reinforce the idea that the main hinderance with AI is our intellectual ability to utilise it for things
- bigDinosaur 3y ago
  I'm confused. How is this evidence for that? It seems evidence that people are thinking of interesting ways to use it, not the opposite.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - omneity 3y ago
    My reading is: “This is a great use of AI. Others who complained AI doesn’t have good applications are lacking imagination.”
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      You've seen people complaining that AI in general doesn't have applications? Even more on pattern matching, where people have been using AIs for applications almost exactly like this one for more than a decade?
    - bloqs 3y ago
      Sorry yes, this comment is correct
- gardenhedge 3y ago
  What? Where is that idea mainstream?
- RetroTechie 3y ago
  AI will do for human brainpower what steam engines & electricity did for physical labour. That's (probably) a big win for society, but not for everyone or in every application. So... Your AI Use May Vary (YAIUMV).
nyankosensei 3y ago
Here’s a link to the referenced article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w
- jadbox 3y ago
  Thank you kind sir. I feel like HN should be better at linking directly to sources.
dalbasal 3y ago
I really wish journalists could cut the crap. If science reporting is this, that's grim There is plenty of interest in covering ideas, papers and efforts that are speculative, hopeful or early as what they are. Early, occasionally pioneering efforts to achieve something which may lead to success in the future, or enable new efforts to sprout at a tangent. Interview researchers. Ask them questions. Interview reviewers and peers. They're accessible. Communicate science. As it is. What science is, is worth covering. Do your job.
- Angostura 3y ago
  I'm not clear as to what your actual issue with the article is? It's a very short article, that clearly sets out the potential and alerts the reader to an interesting development. It includes a quote from an author, so they have spoken to him.
  - defrost 3y ago
    Have they really spoken to him, or just summarised the paper (perhaps poorly), or clipped quotes from a university press pack? The Economist: Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller. The source paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w In the next step, we applied an independent artificial intelligence model for bird species identification, developed and trained in the region of our study prior to our sampling. Despite the model identifying only ~25% of species detected by the experts in our data, the model-derived first community axis was the single best predictor for expert-derived community composition. The thrust of his work is about bird population estimates via vocalisation being used as a predictor for insect biodiversity - number and breadth of insects. There are several recent papers about this work, one that focuses on the bird <-> insect connection, another that looks at the AI utilisation to identify birds. It appears that as of now the AI isn't as good as identifying birds as experts, only being trained to recogise a quarter of the vocalisations, however that's enough of a bird sample to get a reasonable estimate on the insects. I strongly suspect (I lack the smoking gun) that The Economist has just sourced "quotes" provided in the full university presser (the Press Release pack they send out). See, the lesser presser about the AI work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ai-biodiversity-rainforests/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... and a presser about some of the insect work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/weather-insect-decline/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... There are multiple studies and multiple papers stemming from this project: https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-station/prof-dr-joerg-mueller/ https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-statio... and there'll likely be bigger press packs not directly public web hosted for newspaper journalists to pick from.
tomohelix 3y ago
A thing stands out to me about the machine learning is their ability to recognize patterns. We all know that human brain is also well adapted to this task. So adapted in fact that it is probably one of the most fundamental, ingrained thing that we have in the lizard part of our brains. For some reason, to me this kind of subconscious thing hold some special meanings. It feels like the current LLMs are actually going in the right direction to eventually emulate a conscious mind and it shows this by imitating what a mind without consciousness would look like. Personally, if I have to compare the current LLMs to an organic equivalent, I would say we are at the insect level. It can respond to things, know a few surprisingly complex knowledge (spider webs), but ultimately doesn't "understand" what it is doing and just robotically do what it was programmed to do. Good thing is an insect to even the dumbest vertebrate is pretty far away in term of mental cognitive ability so AIs aren't going to spontaneously gain awareness anytime soon.
- throwanem 3y ago
  With so faulty an understanding of animal cognition - with not even the knowledge that insects are animals! - I would hesitate in your shoes to attempt any sweeping conclusions about mechanical cognition.
  - tomohelix 3y ago
    You are right, initially I was thinking of a chicken. Then I forgot what branch a chicken is supposed to be in and wrote animal instead. Changed to vertebrate now. Probably closer. And yeah, this is just my personal view. I didn't say it is what it should be or how it actually is. Nothing sweeping about it. Simply how I feel based on my experience.
    - throwanem 3y ago
      Your experience ill equips you here, then; along with being overly general, your analysis is, I reiterate, very poorly informed. Spiders aren't insects, as I would have noted earlier had I been closer to awake when I posted my prior comment. They're arachnids. Arachnids and insects are both arthropods, but are no more closely related than that. It's not a rare confusion among laypeople, but it is also among the first things anyone learns in the study of either class. That you do not know it bodes ill for all that follows. You mention spiderwebs, which is especially remarkable because they are certainly among the best studied examples of unhuman engineering. Relevant research isn't hard to find, and you will if you feel like it; rather than dig up the same links you can, I'll tell an anecdote that bears them out. A couple of years back, an orb weaver began building her web on my porch every night, for the moths and flies drawn by the light from the front room. Because she opted to build right across the steps down from the porch, one night I faceplanted the web and broke a few strands extricating myself from it. The next night and every night after, she built in the same place, but not in the same way; instead of the classic round orb-web shape, she built wide and squat across the top of the space, retaining about the same prey-capture area and staying within the volume that was busy with potential prey, but with the lower edge of the web now about six feet above the porch floor. That's an interesting figure, because it exceeds by a couple of inches both my height and that of my partner at the time. The spider had no opportunity to size her design to us by eye, as neither he nor I was on the porch while she built this way the first night, and orb weavers' eyesight is far too poor for such a task in any case; by the time we came along to sit on the porch that evening, she had already finished her work. To build as she did, then, she would of necessity have had to understand and remember the spatial relationships involved in my face getting stuck to her web, and then on the next night implement a novel modification to her design such that we could and did pass beneath without conflict - not just with the web itself, but also with its guy lines, none of which crossed the space below the web despite the newel post finials offering a very obvious and easy pair of anchors. And all this while working with useful visual acuity in the span of perhaps one or two centimeters - to a scale which, in our terms, would be that of about a ten-story building. This is not the behavior of a creature operating solely on unconsidered instinct. I can't speculate on what goes on inside a spider's head, but that there is something going on in there, I know better than to doubt; even had I been inclined otherwise, the actions of one spider over the span of a couple of evenings would have amply sufficed to disabuse me of the error. Lest it be said I am ungenerous in my critique, I'll note that, overlooking the taxonomic confusion already discussed, your understanding of insect behavior is roughly on par with that of the naturalist Jean-Henri Fabré, whose writings on spider wasps were much celebrated in their day - which was roughly contemporaneous with the American Civil War. Much has been learned since, most of which Fabré has probably been unable to appreciate owing to his death in 1915. You and I are more fortunate. So if nothing else, it may be worth your while to take advantage of your luck, and pursue your study at least to within shouting distance of the present day before attempting to generalize.
cushpush 3y ago
"Hey Alexa, document civilization"
- ukz 3y ago
  “Hey Alexa, survey North Sentinel Island”
  - ricardo81 3y ago
    I think the local inhabitants have not read and agreed to the terms and conditions of big tech :-)
- seydor 3y ago
  "I detected a human, talking to her friend Alexa"
ImaCake 3y ago
People might be interested in BirdWeather (https://app.birdweather.com/ https://app.birdweather.com/) which collates data from people's bird listening stations (raspberry pi's with a mic and a modest NN to classify what is heard). Basically, the technology for this has already arrived as consumer tech. As someone who is a fairly serious volunteer birdwatcher, we could absolutely do with more of this. There are not enough bird surveyors (paid or volunteer) and audio moths hooked up to AI capable of filling in the gaps are badly needed to support conservation and re-wilding efforts.
- omneity 3y ago
  I thought about setting up such a device outside of my window (there's a lot of birds nearby), and the obvious concern of setting up a mic in your house and uploading recordings is privacy. I found two privacy policies related to Birdweather: 1. https://www.birdweather.com/privacy https://www.birdweather.com/privacy 2. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/privacy-policy/ https://birdnet.cornell.edu/privacy-policy/ The first one mentions the following: > You may choose to keep your audio recordings private, so that other Bird Weather users cannot access or listen to those recordings. This is configured on the Settings page. Except Birdweather explicitly mentions they're based on Cornell's BirdNET, whose privacy policy (#2) says: > BirdNET is an artificial neural network that identifies bird species by sound. Our servers process small audio snippets recorded with the BirdNET app to detect and recognize bird sounds. We store all submitted recordings on our servers. Therefore, we advise users not to submit any audio recordings that they might consider private. The collection of audio data helps us to improve BirdNET and we will use those recordings for research purposes only. Seems like Birdweather would benefit from clarifying how their privacy policy plays together with BirdNET's.
  - FeepingCreature 3y ago
    Seems clear to me: > Third-Party Research: We share the bird detections and audio as well as labeled data with the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, so that they may use such data for scientific research and to help improve the accuracy of the bird sound detection. You can set the audio recordings to be inaccessible for other Bird Weather users. Ie. by default audio is shared on the website, but you can turn that off. Independently, they also share the data with Cornell.
secfirstmd 3y ago
I wonder if we can ever do this with babies to some degree of even limited accuracy. I know there was some efforts on this before.
- totetsu 3y ago
  Ai to identify how many babies are crying in a forest? I think it’s possible.
- echelon_musk 3y ago
  The plot of The Simpsons S03E24: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother,_Can_You_Spare_Two_Dimes%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother,_Can_You_Spare_Two_D...
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
underseacables 3y ago
Could it do this for a city?
- helsinkiandrew 3y ago
  There's automatic shot detection systems: https://www.soundthinking.com/ https://www.soundthinking.com/ https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...
  - uoaei 3y ago
    Worth noting that ShotSpotter isn't AI, and also largely relies on humans to listen to and classify sounds that are picked up. Based on what we've seen with other AI systems applied in these contexts we can only assume it would be even worse at its job in maintaining fairness.
dartos 3y ago
In a non verifiable way, sure.
qwertox 3y ago
I wish car engines had mics built in, as well as one close to each suspension. It would record for the first 5 minutes, then at certain intervals or at certain conditions. The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at and see how it changes over the years. No need for online-stuff, just an USB port where you stick in a big stick and software for your computer/tablet to evaluate/visualize it. If you'd then see some problems, you could ask for the audio to be recorded with it, which you could send to a friend who knows about cars or to your car workshop.
- curiousObject 3y ago
  >The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at and see how it changes Good idea, though AI is much better at doing that in 90% of situations. So filter it thru AI first
  - uoaei 3y ago
    As darling of data science Andrew Ng said, "90% of machine learning is feature engineering". So you should probably run the STFT spectrograms through machine learning models rather than the raw audio signal. And anyway raw audio is over 41k samples per second so quite low information density compared to some simple and quite common transformations like STFT anyway.
- spyder 3y ago
  There are companies working on that using AI: Acoustic sensors in the car: https://v2minc.com/#solution https://v2minc.com/#solution Skoda made s sound analyzer mobile app 3 years ago: https://beebom.com/this-ai-app-detects-internal-issues-in-cars-just-by-sounds/ https://beebom.com/this-ai-app-detects-internal-issues-in-ca...
  - IshKebab 3y ago
    Ah damn I need this! My Skoda has squeaky brakes, except they only squeak when you aren't pressing the brake. Clearly something is rubbing but I can't see what, and it's intermittent and also impossible to Google. I'm skeptical it would actually work well though.
mnky9800n 3y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w The actual paper
kriro 3y ago
Last time I was sitting in the garden, I was wondering how far we are with actualy understanding the bird chirp and tweets. I felt like there were certain patterns I could hear repeatedly in certain situations (danger approach warning, feeding communication, always the same sound before one bird flew out and collected food kind of like "make us breakfast" :P). Unfortunately some quick searches on Google scholar didn't help much, I feel like I'm lacking the right search terms here. Most ML in this area seems to be related to species classification. If there's any bird experts reading, what is the state of the art of "understadning" bird language? Any paper recommendations? I'm curious about basic things like...is there a universal bird language or does each species use their own language (can a crow understand a sparrow), are there some sounds that are identified with meaning etc. Edit: just checked my bookmarks and "Bird-DB: A database for annotated bird song sequences" was the most interesting find, along with some interesting datasets (NIPS, Cornell Birdcall). I was envisioning a ML powered device that could translate bird chirps to human readable text but my guess is that we're still in the fundamental research phase. One idea I had was recording stuff in my garden and running it through some unsupervised algorithms to identify some patterns than match it with video and maybe tag context. Would be really neat to find a pattern and see it correspond to the same situation (cat approaching). Seems like a neat summer project but I'm not even sure how to tag and label things :) A first version that identifies the individual birds and their species would already be cool and I suppose feasible. Bird A (sparrow) speaking...bird B speaking etc. would already be fun...might give them random names, too instead of A,B,C. That would also help with the next stage for tagging etc.
- tomrod 3y ago
  I believe ML could certainly perform cataloging (clustering). That would be step one to assigning inherent meaning.
- defrex 3y ago
  Aza Raskin's earth species project is working on this. He gave a ted talk about it recently, in which he also recommends a couple books. https://youtu.be/3tUXbbbMhvk?si=6ESL-zuPIHXFULbC https://youtu.be/3tUXbbbMhvk?si=6ESL-zuPIHXFULbC
- 3y ago
tomrod 3y ago
Incompletely. This faces a similar issue to much of the bottoms-up air quality work I've been working on. Listening means that: (a) coverage is limited to receptor area, so proximity is required (proximity bias) (b) the inhabitants have sufficient volume to be heard (frequency bias)
- linsomniac 3y ago
  Not necessarily true for (b): quiet inhabitants may be ratted out by other inhabitants. Birds will literally call out "snake" (in their bird language) or "puma" to alert others. Stuff You Should Know covered it on an episode "How We're Learning to Talk to Animals": https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269...
hm-nah 3y ago
It’s terrible, but this technology is likely coming to a bar/pub/cafe/store/park/trail near you… diarization, voice recognition… I’m concerned that in the near future, humans can no longer assume that their words are not being captured and potentially used for who-knows-what purposes. The commons, Alexafied.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- erkt 3y ago
  Time to normalize personal white noise generators.
  - renjimen 3y ago
    I think that would just be an arms race that AI would undoubtably win at the expense of our sanity.
    - lovemenot 3y ago
      It's not humans vs AI. It's intrusive humans empowered by AI vs privacy-protecting humans empowered by AI.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  It's not like recording technology is new. It's only because most countries have laws providing that tools like these are not widely used by government. And I don't believe AI is going to change the laws significantly. I don't believe most of the 1984 stuff will happen at least in near future.
- renjimen 3y ago
  Easily solved with more tech! Subaudible recording with mic on throat —> encrypted transmission to peers —> peers’ earbuds. Conversation 2.0, or something. Sarcasm, but wouldn’t be surprising if it happens eventually
spandextwins 3y ago
Can you imagine if they took the same money and time and just planted trees? No more global climate change.
ProllyInfamous 3y ago
There is an app which [greatly] assists in determining if government-minted coins are in fact solid AUTHENTIC gold bullion -struck. It listens to the resonance after you tap the coin lightly with a lighter. Something to do with harmonics [I have a fairly good ear for this, myself, but only with well-known currency]. Similar to a digital guitar tuner. But this simple app really left me awe-struck. Many of the laser testing machines can be fooled in certain gold-plated frauds. Gold's "ting" is unmistakable. It's nice to have a virtual co-agreement when dealing in high-stakes quick transactions.
willcipriano 3y ago
Miniaturize it and make it into a small, waterproof, rugged device that I can take backpacking with me and I'd pay a handsome sum. (I don't want a cell phone app, my cell phone remains off while hiking)
- lnsru 3y ago
  I made it! The device is small and waterproof, but its battery weights 10 pounds. Continuous FFT processing and other mathematics are power hungry. Is was vibration logger for industrial applications. App would be definitely better for you.
  - willcipriano 3y ago
    No cell service where I'm going. Online apps are useless on most of the earths surface.
samf 3y ago
I've often thought about how this sort of thing could be used for site security, much like cameras are used. E.g. it could hear a person's footsteps, and hear a person breathing, and it could distinguish between a person and an animal. With multiple microphones, it could determine a location. I wonder if this is being done already.
- dylan604 3y ago
  There's a system being used now to attempt to triangulate gun shots, but it's not widely praised as being very successful
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    From what I understand about shotspotter it is really good at triangulating the location of a sound. The issues it runs into are all human. It uses humans to determine whether a recorded sound is a gunshot or some other sound. It is deployed selectively in cities, in areas chosen by the police department (very frequently in minority neighborhoods). Conclusions have been used as evidence in court without exposing the underlying data and algorithms used to reach the conclusion.
Animats 3y ago
Log: Human footfall. Branch break. Human footfall. Branch break. Weapon cocking, AR-15. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. ...
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  Makes sense. Is "monitor forest restoration" the new "search and rescue" euphemism for military applications? "We're going to use this robot to find people inside of urban rubble... uhh.... after earthquakes of course.."
AlbertCory 3y ago
I had the exact same idea, after I wondered why my dog seemed unnaturally eager to go out in the yard, even after he'd just been. It turned out there was a possum in the yard. I know they're quiet, in general, but they do make the occasional sound. I was thinking he must have heard it, which led to... this idea. Naturalists seemed like an obvious client.
mikrotikker 3y ago
The dept of conservation in NZ is using a similar thing in remote locations to detect the call of a bird that we haven't seen in a while. It is thought to be extinct, but we thought the takahe was extinct too. From memory it's the one shown at the end of ”Hunt for the Wilderpeople”. Keep it skux.
- arbitrary_name 3y ago
  Awww chur bro

https://archive.ph/yBaZe https://archive.ph/yBaZe

It's headlines like this that really reinforce the idea that the main hinderance with AI is our intellectual ability to utilise it for things

bigDinosaur 3y ago
I'm confused. How is this evidence for that? It seems evidence that people are thinking of interesting ways to use it, not the opposite.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- omneity 3y ago
  My reading is: “This is a great use of AI. Others who complained AI doesn’t have good applications are lacking imagination.”
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    You've seen people complaining that AI in general doesn't have applications? Even more on pattern matching, where people have been using AIs for applications almost exactly like this one for more than a decade?
  - bloqs 3y ago
    Sorry yes, this comment is correct
gardenhedge 3y ago
What? Where is that idea mainstream?
RetroTechie 3y ago
AI will do for human brainpower what steam engines & electricity did for physical labour. That's (probably) a big win for society, but not for everyone or in every application. So... Your AI Use May Vary (YAIUMV).

nyankosensei 3y ago

Here’s a link to the referenced article: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w

jadbox 3y ago
Thank you kind sir. I feel like HN should be better at linking directly to sources.

dalbasal 3y ago

I really wish journalists could cut the crap. If science reporting is this, that's grim There is plenty of interest in covering ideas, papers and efforts that are speculative, hopeful or early as what they are. Early, occasionally pioneering efforts to achieve something which may lead to success in the future, or enable new efforts to sprout at a tangent. Interview researchers. Ask them questions. Interview reviewers and peers. They're accessible. Communicate science. As it is. What science is, is worth covering. Do your job.

Angostura 3y ago
I'm not clear as to what your actual issue with the article is? It's a very short article, that clearly sets out the potential and alerts the reader to an interesting development. It includes a quote from an author, so they have spoken to him.
- defrost 3y ago
  Have they really spoken to him, or just summarised the paper (perhaps poorly), or clipped quotes from a university press pack? The Economist: Then it was the computer’s turn. The researchers fed their recordings to artificial-intelligence models that had been trained, using sound samples from elsewhere in Ecuador, to identify 75 bird species from their calls. “We found that the AI tools could identify the sounds as well as the experts,” says Dr Müller. The source paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w In the next step, we applied an independent artificial intelligence model for bird species identification, developed and trained in the region of our study prior to our sampling. Despite the model identifying only ~25% of species detected by the experts in our data, the model-derived first community axis was the single best predictor for expert-derived community composition. The thrust of his work is about bird population estimates via vocalisation being used as a predictor for insect biodiversity - number and breadth of insects. There are several recent papers about this work, one that focuses on the bird <-> insect connection, another that looks at the AI utilisation to identify birds. It appears that as of now the AI isn't as good as identifying birds as experts, only being trained to recogise a quarter of the vocalisations, however that's enough of a bird sample to get a reasonable estimate on the insects. I strongly suspect (I lack the smoking gun) that The Economist has just sourced "quotes" provided in the full university presser (the Press Release pack they send out). See, the lesser presser about the AI work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/ai-biodiversity-rainforests/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... and a presser about some of the insect work: https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/news/weather-insect-decline/ https://www.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/news-and-events/news/detail/... There are multiple studies and multiple papers stemming from this project: https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-station/prof-dr-joerg-mueller/ https://www.biozentrum.uni-wuerzburg.de/en/ecological-statio... and there'll likely be bigger press packs not directly public web hosted for newspaper journalists to pick from.

tomohelix 3y ago

A thing stands out to me about the machine learning is their ability to recognize patterns. We all know that human brain is also well adapted to this task. So adapted in fact that it is probably one of the most fundamental, ingrained thing that we have in the lizard part of our brains. For some reason, to me this kind of subconscious thing hold some special meanings. It feels like the current LLMs are actually going in the right direction to eventually emulate a conscious mind and it shows this by imitating what a mind without consciousness would look like. Personally, if I have to compare the current LLMs to an organic equivalent, I would say we are at the insect level. It can respond to things, know a few surprisingly complex knowledge (spider webs), but ultimately doesn't "understand" what it is doing and just robotically do what it was programmed to do. Good thing is an insect to even the dumbest vertebrate is pretty far away in term of mental cognitive ability so AIs aren't going to spontaneously gain awareness anytime soon.

throwanem 3y ago
With so faulty an understanding of animal cognition - with not even the knowledge that insects are animals! - I would hesitate in your shoes to attempt any sweeping conclusions about mechanical cognition.
- tomohelix 3y ago
  You are right, initially I was thinking of a chicken. Then I forgot what branch a chicken is supposed to be in and wrote animal instead. Changed to vertebrate now. Probably closer. And yeah, this is just my personal view. I didn't say it is what it should be or how it actually is. Nothing sweeping about it. Simply how I feel based on my experience.
  - throwanem 3y ago
    Your experience ill equips you here, then; along with being overly general, your analysis is, I reiterate, very poorly informed. Spiders aren't insects, as I would have noted earlier had I been closer to awake when I posted my prior comment. They're arachnids. Arachnids and insects are both arthropods, but are no more closely related than that. It's not a rare confusion among laypeople, but it is also among the first things anyone learns in the study of either class. That you do not know it bodes ill for all that follows. You mention spiderwebs, which is especially remarkable because they are certainly among the best studied examples of unhuman engineering. Relevant research isn't hard to find, and you will if you feel like it; rather than dig up the same links you can, I'll tell an anecdote that bears them out. A couple of years back, an orb weaver began building her web on my porch every night, for the moths and flies drawn by the light from the front room. Because she opted to build right across the steps down from the porch, one night I faceplanted the web and broke a few strands extricating myself from it. The next night and every night after, she built in the same place, but not in the same way; instead of the classic round orb-web shape, she built wide and squat across the top of the space, retaining about the same prey-capture area and staying within the volume that was busy with potential prey, but with the lower edge of the web now about six feet above the porch floor. That's an interesting figure, because it exceeds by a couple of inches both my height and that of my partner at the time. The spider had no opportunity to size her design to us by eye, as neither he nor I was on the porch while she built this way the first night, and orb weavers' eyesight is far too poor for such a task in any case; by the time we came along to sit on the porch that evening, she had already finished her work. To build as she did, then, she would of necessity have had to understand and remember the spatial relationships involved in my face getting stuck to her web, and then on the next night implement a novel modification to her design such that we could and did pass beneath without conflict - not just with the web itself, but also with its guy lines, none of which crossed the space below the web despite the newel post finials offering a very obvious and easy pair of anchors. And all this while working with useful visual acuity in the span of perhaps one or two centimeters - to a scale which, in our terms, would be that of about a ten-story building. This is not the behavior of a creature operating solely on unconsidered instinct. I can't speculate on what goes on inside a spider's head, but that there is something going on in there, I know better than to doubt; even had I been inclined otherwise, the actions of one spider over the span of a couple of evenings would have amply sufficed to disabuse me of the error. Lest it be said I am ungenerous in my critique, I'll note that, overlooking the taxonomic confusion already discussed, your understanding of insect behavior is roughly on par with that of the naturalist Jean-Henri Fabré, whose writings on spider wasps were much celebrated in their day - which was roughly contemporaneous with the American Civil War. Much has been learned since, most of which Fabré has probably been unable to appreciate owing to his death in 1915. You and I are more fortunate. So if nothing else, it may be worth your while to take advantage of your luck, and pursue your study at least to within shouting distance of the present day before attempting to generalize.

cushpush 3y ago

"Hey Alexa, document civilization"

ukz 3y ago
“Hey Alexa, survey North Sentinel Island”
- ricardo81 3y ago
  I think the local inhabitants have not read and agreed to the terms and conditions of big tech :-)
seydor 3y ago
"I detected a human, talking to her friend Alexa"

ImaCake 3y ago

People might be interested in BirdWeather (https://app.birdweather.com/ https://app.birdweather.com/) which collates data from people's bird listening stations (raspberry pi's with a mic and a modest NN to classify what is heard). Basically, the technology for this has already arrived as consumer tech. As someone who is a fairly serious volunteer birdwatcher, we could absolutely do with more of this. There are not enough bird surveyors (paid or volunteer) and audio moths hooked up to AI capable of filling in the gaps are badly needed to support conservation and re-wilding efforts.

omneity 3y ago
I thought about setting up such a device outside of my window (there's a lot of birds nearby), and the obvious concern of setting up a mic in your house and uploading recordings is privacy. I found two privacy policies related to Birdweather: 1. https://www.birdweather.com/privacy https://www.birdweather.com/privacy 2. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/privacy-policy/ https://birdnet.cornell.edu/privacy-policy/ The first one mentions the following: > You may choose to keep your audio recordings private, so that other Bird Weather users cannot access or listen to those recordings. This is configured on the Settings page. Except Birdweather explicitly mentions they're based on Cornell's BirdNET, whose privacy policy (#2) says: > BirdNET is an artificial neural network that identifies bird species by sound. Our servers process small audio snippets recorded with the BirdNET app to detect and recognize bird sounds. We store all submitted recordings on our servers. Therefore, we advise users not to submit any audio recordings that they might consider private. The collection of audio data helps us to improve BirdNET and we will use those recordings for research purposes only. Seems like Birdweather would benefit from clarifying how their privacy policy plays together with BirdNET's.
- FeepingCreature 3y ago
  Seems clear to me: > Third-Party Research: We share the bird detections and audio as well as labeled data with the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, so that they may use such data for scientific research and to help improve the accuracy of the bird sound detection. You can set the audio recordings to be inaccessible for other Bird Weather users. Ie. by default audio is shared on the website, but you can turn that off. Independently, they also share the data with Cornell.

secfirstmd 3y ago

I wonder if we can ever do this with babies to some degree of even limited accuracy. I know there was some efforts on this before.

totetsu 3y ago
Ai to identify how many babies are crying in a forest? I think it’s possible.
echelon_musk 3y ago
The plot of The Simpsons S03E24: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother,_Can_You_Spare_Two_Dimes%3F https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brother,_Can_You_Spare_Two_D...
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underseacables 3y ago

Could it do this for a city?

helsinkiandrew 3y ago
There's automatic shot detection systems: https://www.soundthinking.com/ https://www.soundthinking.com/ https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-with-the-shotspotter-gunshot-detection-system https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/four-problems-w...
- uoaei 3y ago
  Worth noting that ShotSpotter isn't AI, and also largely relies on humans to listen to and classify sounds that are picked up. Based on what we've seen with other AI systems applied in these contexts we can only assume it would be even worse at its job in maintaining fairness.

dartos 3y ago

In a non verifiable way, sure.

qwertox 3y ago

I wish car engines had mics built in, as well as one close to each suspension. It would record for the first 5 minutes, then at certain intervals or at certain conditions. The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at and see how it changes over the years. No need for online-stuff, just an USB port where you stick in a big stick and software for your computer/tablet to evaluate/visualize it. If you'd then see some problems, you could ask for the audio to be recorded with it, which you could send to a friend who knows about cars or to your car workshop.

curiousObject 3y ago
>The car would give you FFT images which you could then look at and see how it changes Good idea, though AI is much better at doing that in 90% of situations. So filter it thru AI first
- uoaei 3y ago
  As darling of data science Andrew Ng said, "90% of machine learning is feature engineering". So you should probably run the STFT spectrograms through machine learning models rather than the raw audio signal. And anyway raw audio is over 41k samples per second so quite low information density compared to some simple and quite common transformations like STFT anyway.
spyder 3y ago
There are companies working on that using AI: Acoustic sensors in the car: https://v2minc.com/#solution https://v2minc.com/#solution Skoda made s sound analyzer mobile app 3 years ago: https://beebom.com/this-ai-app-detects-internal-issues-in-cars-just-by-sounds/ https://beebom.com/this-ai-app-detects-internal-issues-in-ca...
- IshKebab 3y ago
  Ah damn I need this! My Skoda has squeaky brakes, except they only squeak when you aren't pressing the brake. Clearly something is rubbing but I can't see what, and it's intermittent and also impossible to Google. I'm skeptical it would actually work well though.

mnky9800n 3y ago

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-41693-w The actual paper

kriro 3y ago

Last time I was sitting in the garden, I was wondering how far we are with actualy understanding the bird chirp and tweets. I felt like there were certain patterns I could hear repeatedly in certain situations (danger approach warning, feeding communication, always the same sound before one bird flew out and collected food kind of like "make us breakfast" :P). Unfortunately some quick searches on Google scholar didn't help much, I feel like I'm lacking the right search terms here. Most ML in this area seems to be related to species classification. If there's any bird experts reading, what is the state of the art of "understadning" bird language? Any paper recommendations? I'm curious about basic things like...is there a universal bird language or does each species use their own language (can a crow understand a sparrow), are there some sounds that are identified with meaning etc. Edit: just checked my bookmarks and "Bird-DB: A database for annotated bird song sequences" was the most interesting find, along with some interesting datasets (NIPS, Cornell Birdcall). I was envisioning a ML powered device that could translate bird chirps to human readable text but my guess is that we're still in the fundamental research phase. One idea I had was recording stuff in my garden and running it through some unsupervised algorithms to identify some patterns than match it with video and maybe tag context. Would be really neat to find a pattern and see it correspond to the same situation (cat approaching). Seems like a neat summer project but I'm not even sure how to tag and label things :) A first version that identifies the individual birds and their species would already be cool and I suppose feasible. Bird A (sparrow) speaking...bird B speaking etc. would already be fun...might give them random names, too instead of A,B,C. That would also help with the next stage for tagging etc.

tomrod 3y ago
I believe ML could certainly perform cataloging (clustering). That would be step one to assigning inherent meaning.
defrex 3y ago
Aza Raskin's earth species project is working on this. He gave a ted talk about it recently, in which he also recommends a couple books. https://youtu.be/3tUXbbbMhvk?si=6ESL-zuPIHXFULbC https://youtu.be/3tUXbbbMhvk?si=6ESL-zuPIHXFULbC
3y ago

tomrod 3y ago

Incompletely. This faces a similar issue to much of the bottoms-up air quality work I've been working on. Listening means that: (a) coverage is limited to receptor area, so proximity is required (proximity bias) (b) the inhabitants have sufficient volume to be heard (frequency bias)

linsomniac 3y ago
Not necessarily true for (b): quiet inhabitants may be ratted out by other inhabitants. Birds will literally call out "snake" (in their bird language) or "puma" to alert others. Stuff You Should Know covered it on an episode "How We're Learning to Talk to Animals": https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-26940277/ https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-stuff-you-should-know-269...

hm-nah 3y ago

It’s terrible, but this technology is likely coming to a bar/pub/cafe/store/park/trail near you… diarization, voice recognition… I’m concerned that in the near future, humans can no longer assume that their words are not being captured and potentially used for who-knows-what purposes. The commons, Alexafied.

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erkt 3y ago
Time to normalize personal white noise generators.
- renjimen 3y ago
  I think that would just be an arms race that AI would undoubtably win at the expense of our sanity.
  - lovemenot 3y ago
    It's not humans vs AI. It's intrusive humans empowered by AI vs privacy-protecting humans empowered by AI.
YetAnotherNick 3y ago
It's not like recording technology is new. It's only because most countries have laws providing that tools like these are not widely used by government. And I don't believe AI is going to change the laws significantly. I don't believe most of the 1984 stuff will happen at least in near future.
renjimen 3y ago
Easily solved with more tech! Subaudible recording with mic on throat —> encrypted transmission to peers —> peers’ earbuds. Conversation 2.0, or something. Sarcasm, but wouldn’t be surprising if it happens eventually

spandextwins 3y ago

Can you imagine if they took the same money and time and just planted trees? No more global climate change.

ProllyInfamous 3y ago

There is an app which [greatly] assists in determining if government-minted coins are in fact solid AUTHENTIC gold bullion -struck. It listens to the resonance after you tap the coin lightly with a lighter. Something to do with harmonics [I have a fairly good ear for this, myself, but only with well-known currency]. Similar to a digital guitar tuner. But this simple app really left me awe-struck. Many of the laser testing machines can be fooled in certain gold-plated frauds. Gold's "ting" is unmistakable. It's nice to have a virtual co-agreement when dealing in high-stakes quick transactions.

willcipriano 3y ago

Miniaturize it and make it into a small, waterproof, rugged device that I can take backpacking with me and I'd pay a handsome sum. (I don't want a cell phone app, my cell phone remains off while hiking)

lnsru 3y ago
I made it! The device is small and waterproof, but its battery weights 10 pounds. Continuous FFT processing and other mathematics are power hungry. Is was vibration logger for industrial applications. App would be definitely better for you.
- willcipriano 3y ago
  No cell service where I'm going. Online apps are useless on most of the earths surface.

samf 3y ago

I've often thought about how this sort of thing could be used for site security, much like cameras are used. E.g. it could hear a person's footsteps, and hear a person breathing, and it could distinguish between a person and an animal. With multiple microphones, it could determine a location. I wonder if this is being done already.

dylan604 3y ago
There's a system being used now to attempt to triangulate gun shots, but it's not widely praised as being very successful
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  From what I understand about shotspotter it is really good at triangulating the location of a sound. The issues it runs into are all human. It uses humans to determine whether a recorded sound is a gunshot or some other sound. It is deployed selectively in cities, in areas chosen by the police department (very frequently in minority neighborhoods). Conclusions have been used as evidence in court without exposing the underlying data and algorithms used to reach the conclusion.

Animats 3y ago

Log: Human footfall. Branch break. Human footfall. Branch break. Weapon cocking, AR-15. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. Weapon firing, AR-15. No hit. ...

mcpackieh 3y ago
Makes sense. Is "monitor forest restoration" the new "search and rescue" euphemism for military applications? "We're going to use this robot to find people inside of urban rubble... uhh.... after earthquakes of course.."

AlbertCory 3y ago

I had the exact same idea, after I wondered why my dog seemed unnaturally eager to go out in the yard, even after he'd just been. It turned out there was a possum in the yard. I know they're quiet, in general, but they do make the occasional sound. I was thinking he must have heard it, which led to... this idea. Naturalists seemed like an obvious client.

mikrotikker 3y ago

The dept of conservation in NZ is using a similar thing in remote locations to detect the call of a bird that we haven't seen in a while. It is thought to be extinct, but we thought the takahe was extinct too. From memory it's the one shown at the end of ”Hunt for the Wilderpeople”. Keep it skux.

arbitrary_name 3y ago
Awww chur bro