LTI-SEMINAR
Date: July 7, Monday
Time: 2:00pm
Place: 1305 NSH 

Speaker: Alan W Black, LTI

Title: Towards Communicating with Dolphins

Authors: Alan W Black, Tanja Schultz, and Robert Frederking

Abstract:
After working in the area of rapid development of speech-to-speech
translation systems for human languages with limited resources, we
were recently contacted about applying our techniques to communication
with dolphins.  Of course although full translation is not feasible,
there is a number of ways speech technology can help in dolphin
research.

Working with the Wild Dolphin Project, who have almost 20 years of
experience with a pod of spotted dolphins 40 miles off the Bahamas, we
are using their existing recordings for this work, and currently
designing new equipment to allow collection of more data.

After a general description of dolphin acoustics, this talk will
describe some areas where speech recognition technology can be used to
better classify dolphin recordings, and present initial results on a
simple dolphin ID system based on signature whistles.  Also we will
describe a framework for an experiment we intend to run later this
summer, to investigate how dolphins may relate to synthesized noises
in their acoustic domain, and how they may mimic them.