Understanding the Structure of Sperm Whale Communication | Pratyusha Sharma | TEDxMIT Salon

Communication is a key characteristic of intelligence. Understanding the communication system of another species and its complexity helps us understand their intelligence, cognition, environment, and culture. This talk focuses on sperm whale communication. Sperm whales communicate using clicks, and their communication calls are made by putting together a short packet of clicks called codas. This talk shows that sperm whale vocalizations are more complex than previously believed--the "sperm whale phonetic alphabet" has both combinatorial structure and context-dependent call modulation. Combinatorial vocalization systems are rare, and their presence indicates that, in principle, the species is capable of representing a wider space of messages.
Pratyusha Sharma is a PhD student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT. She works on developing algorithms to understand the structure of solutions artificial neural networks implement, understanding the complexity and structure of naturally arising animal communication systems in the wild, and how language and natural-language-like structures can support effective reasoning and planning in embodied agents and robots. Before this, she received her Bachelor’s degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. She has presented research papers at machine learning, robotics, NLP, computer vision, and biology venues, including, NeurIPS, RSS, CVPR, ACL, SMM, Nature Communications, etc. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx

[@GeoffroiRidel]

Brilliant ! I hope as understanding grows, this would help us reconsider our place in the cognitive world and see it as the complex bush it is rather than a pyramid with - in our hubris - humans on top (A world view that has historically always been wrong). It's unfortunate that we only seem to measure intelligence using our own as a scale, that's a very significant anthropocentric bias. So many animal cognitive studies focus on tasks we are good at to judge cognition, ignoring their unique perceptions of the world (umwelt). To truly understand or judge complex cognition, we must consider that perspectives can vary heavily. It is probably too soon to know if we will ever be able to fully grasp their communication in its nuances. After all it stems from a vastly different neurology and there might be limitations to what can be conveyed between different species with different neurology. But any steps in that direction leaves me dreaming about it.

[@janetsanders5356]

Why is the illustration associated of a different species of whale

[@Growup723]

I am Indian