Using AI to translate human language is nothing new, but the results that can be achieved in deciphering animal language could be astounding.
Dolphins and mice are the main suspects among the animals whose language we could understand with the use of artificial intelligence.
In a probable attempt to give the cutest scientific news of the year, a group of scientists from the University of Washington have announced a new AI system that aims to decipher the squeaking of mice.
DeepSqueak, an advanced software, can analyze rodent vocalizations and compare sounds with the behaviors observed in laboratory settings. With this process, a progressive decoding of the language of mice and other rodents can take place: the researchers hope that this technology can be useful in a vast field of medical and psychological studies.
The research, published this week in the scientific journal Neuropsychopharmacology, is based on a revolutionary use of the spectrogram, capable of transforming a sound signal into an image or a series of graphics.
The visual findings thus obtained are then analyzed with the help of advanced machine learning algorithms, belonging to the same "family" of those used by current autonomous driving systems to "see" the road and the context in which the cars move without driver.
The advantage of the DeepSqueak system is that it can "listen" to sounds that would otherwise be unhearable by the human ear: “rodents have a very rich communication system, which goes beyond the range of sounds perceptible to humans,” says Russell Marx, one of the researchers who presented the study. “Our software works to visualize all these sounds, observe their shape and structure, and organize them by category.”
See DeepSqueak in action
Marx and the other co-creator Kevin Coffey are scholars of psychology and addictions and have already made interesting discoveries in both fields: they became interested in understanding rodent satisfaction or depression signals by working with them in drug addiction experiments.
Mice, observes Coffey, are very happy at the sight of a reward (such as sugar), but also show satisfaction in particular social situations. Again: male rodents are more "repetitive" when they are among subjects of the same gender, while they make their range of expressions more complex in the presence of a specimen of the opposite sex. (Geez, like us humans! At the pub between boys only football and engines?).
We could go on and on imagining future applications of this technology, but the research team's short-term goal is to use it for in-depth addiction research.
“If scientists could better understand how substances change brain activity by inducing pleasant or unpleasant sensations,” say the researchers, “We could develop much more effective treatments for addictions”.
Let's see what the mice say.
